ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 21, 2011 4:00 AM ESTFinal Words
ASUS delivered three things with the Eee Pad: a very competitive price point ($399), a surprisingly useful (albeit pricey) dock, and a good display. The price point alone is enough to make the Eee Pad the Honeycomb tablet to get assuming you don't need integrated 3G or LTE connectivity. The Eee Pad is comfortable to hold and use and despite the lower price point you don't feel like ASUS has sacrificed much at all to make it. The display has similar characteristics to what Apple ships in the iPad 2. Overall from a hardware standpoint, the Eee Pad is solid.
The Transformer dock is an extremely tempting addition to the Eee Pad, I only wish it were cheaper. When in use the dock extends battery life by 64%, pushing the Eee Pad past 15.5 hours in our general WiFi test. ASUS tells me that the Transformer dock will be compatible with all Transformer branded tablets in the future. I can imagine a thinner Kal-El based version must be in the works at this point.
Tight integration between the keyboard/trackpad and Honeycomb makes the Eee Pad Transformer one part tablet and one part Android netbook, and the whole thing works a lot better than I expected it to. When you need a netbook form factor, you have one, and when you just want to kick back and relax with a tablet you've got that as well. The experience isn't quite fast enough for me to replace my notebook, but I can see where things are headed.
I actually believe the dockable tablet is indicative of where the netbook (and perhaps ultra portable notebook) market is going. Give me some more (or faster) cores and an OS even better suited for notebook duty and the line between a tablet and a netbook becomes quite blurry. I finally understand why NVIDIA opted for four cores in Kal-El and why Microsoft keeps looking to Windows 8 to be its tablet strategy. Windows 8 tablets will be Windows 8 netbooks; they'll just be modular.
The biggest issues here are software related. Honeycomb has matured significantly just with the 3.0.1 update, but there are still dock and camera behavior issues that need to be worked out before ASUS takes the Eee Pad to market. I feel like Honeycomb got a worse rap than it deserves, but there are real issues that need addressing here. I lost a couple of pages of this review thanks to an unexpected hard lock and a reboot while typing this on the Eee Pad. For casual use it's not an issue but the platform isn't mature enough for real work yet.
So why do companies keep introducing tablets with known software issues? I always remember what AMD's Eric Demers once told me: the best way to lose a fight is to not show up.
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aZUEStablet - Wednesday, July 6, 2011 - link
There is tons of use for it right now... the only issue is that it needs to be supported for a while and asus needs to build enough trust that it will continue to be supported for more that a season.i was pretty impressed when the tablet when it when up on my door step!! i was so stoked on it i spazzed out a little and made a (kind of) dumb video of me hooking it up to my aaxa tech m2 micro projector: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_AFAPJGSLs
xype - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
"So why do companies keep introducing tablets with known software issues? I always remember what AMD's Eric Demers once told me: the best way to lose a fight is to not show up."Uhm, you do know that showing up unprepared for a fight only gives you very slightly better chances than not showing up? And that showing up to a _real_ fight might get you killed, while staying at home won't?
This whole talk reminds me of geeks dating. You think by showing up looking like a hobo will give you a chance to woo the other person with your inner values—but it won't. You'll just disqualify yourself from further consideration (at least for a while).
All the companies producing Android tablets would do better to wait a bit, get a haircut, apply some makeup and then try to woo the customers. Right now, they're all just making a bad impression and—as is always the case with Android—spout promises of a better future.
Either Google will really, really increase their development tempo and hire some good designers (which they won't, because they're retarded) and magically overtake Apple, or they'll simply stay that ugly chick that hopes some horny guy will take her home at the end of the night.
Rick83 - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
If you're the horny guy, it's better to take home the ugly chick for cheap than wait 2 months until the pretty girl is available only to find out that she won't put out unless you bath her in champagne and diamonds...xype - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
Ooor, you work your, get a haircut, some manners and score a score of hot chicks. But that sounds too much like effort and risk, doesn't it? Never been the strong suit of Apple's competitors.medi01 - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
BS.Many products out there have superior hardware and features than iStuff.
Not only that, but creator iStuff is the only company out there that dares to deny user free access to his own content. (not able to sync ipod with more than one PC? not able to read stuff from it? "comfortable" isn't it?)
xype - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
1) No, not many. At best a few are better in a category or two.2) I have "free access" (whatever that means) to everything on my iPhone and was syncing it with two computers when I had two. Don't blame others for your incompetence.
anishannayya - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
Medi01 is talking about the ability to root the hardware. You know, take full functionality and capability of the device that you forked your hard owned money for. In your words, don't blame others for your incompetence (ignorance).Azethoth - Friday, April 22, 2011 - link
Ya know, I am a computer programmer and while I did not mind hacking out some mods for the WoW ui which really needs it, why on earth would I want to do that for a phone? A phone that comes with thousands of apps that do useful things. In other words, it is about the apps. It is not about hacking the OS.So please actually state what it is you get from rooting your phone? What is so important in its guts that you feel ripped off not getting in there and mucking around with it?
evil bob - Friday, April 22, 2011 - link
The ability to strip out all the battery eating bloatware the carrier installed and insists you want running 24/7.Sprint, for example, installs Nascar and Football applications amongst its bloatware that run in the background nearly every phone they currently sell. You can go into the phone settings and turn them off, check again in a couple minutes and they're back up and running again, their bloatware is persistant.
Rooting my Evo 4G and stripping out said bloatware doubled by battery runtime the day I rooted it. Further refinements went into the OS, installation of an app killer and a CPU manager, and now I'm getting 30+ hours out of my smartphone when before in stock form it was lucky to last 6 hours off the battery.
It was well worth the time mucking around with the "guts" to more than triple the battery life.
Sukaflops - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
I may not be the biggest fan of IOS devices but you can sync them on 5 authorized computers.