ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 21, 2011 4:00 AM ESTBattery Life & Performance
The Eee Pad has an integrated 24.4Wh battery as well as an optional external 24.4Wh battery courtesy of the Transformer dock. The tablet by itself has battery life similar to that of the Motorola Xoom, and shorter than the iPad 2. With the dock however we measured a 64% increase in battery life in our general use test. With over 15.5 hours of battery life on a single charge, a docked Eee Pad is pretty impressive.
ASUS tells us we aren't seeing a near doubling of battery life with the dock in use because of inefficiencies in the current firmware—something that could improve with the May firmware update.
Video playback battery life is identical to the Xoom. Remember NVIDIA's Tegra 2 doesn't completely accelerate the H.264 decode pipeline, so there's some software offloading that unfortunately keeps the Cortex A9s awake during our video decode test. As a result the Eee Pad and Xoom post lower-than-iPad results here.
With a 1GHz Tegra 2 under the hood, the Eee Pad performs just like a Xoom:
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
I just confirmed with ASUS, the US version does have GPS hardware. Maps seems to require an active WiFi connection to use GPS however, which is why I originally assumed it wasn't present. My mistake, I've corrected the review :)Take care,
Anand
Ananke - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
If the US version has no usable GPS, it is worthless at the $399. It may be considerable purchase at $299. Asus shall make no such mistake, it would be marketing suicide. Besides, they have only a month window in US to penetrate the market. In June, once Samsung and Co come with competing products, it is going to get ugly. There is no time for mistakes.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
That was an error on my part - sorry about that! There is GPS hardware in the Eee Pad Transformer.Take care,
Anand
Ananke - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
Thank you Anand, for clarifying this. Your review is excellent, btw. I also wish all the best to ASUS - they are the first and only for now with a quality tablet that actually makes sense to own and use.swaaye - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
Android needs to improve a bit before I think it's ideal for this kind of thing. Their GUI acceleration is still seriously lacking and it makes the stock browser slow even on these somewhat powerful devices. My EeePC 900 on XP with a pathetic Celeron 900 and GMA 900 browses faster than the Xoom in my experience.I think the only advantage to Android is touch input in tablet mode. But there is a real load of disadvantages to it.
Ikshaar - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
Hmmm someone changed the text in the review... from not having GPS to no mention at all.Does anyone know if this has GPS or not ?
MilwaukeeMike - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
Yes. :)Ikshaar - Thursday, April 21, 2011 - link
Thanks. Cool. I see now the other comments... I guess we all posted at once.Now I wonder if this works with the WiFi tethering on my phone (Nexus), so I can get maps even when in the middle of nowhere.
I am as mad as hell - Friday, April 22, 2011 - link
Oh uh, more confusion upon us.. just head over to Engadget.com !They just mentioned that the Transformer has only a A-GPS, not a GPS!
So what is it now?
qhinton - Monday, April 25, 2011 - link
I assume you live in milwaukee. Have you heard of BEST BUY carrying this.