Speaking of colors, the display is extremely bright and crisp. Viewing angles are stellar, and unlike the Iconia A500, colors don’t blur at more pronounced angles. The quality of the 10.1-inch, 1280×800-resolution Gorilla Glass display is just downright impressive, especially for the price. It doesn’t have a micro-USB port or a full-sized USB port like the Acer Iconia A500, which can be quite a pain when you want to sync media with a PC, but the keyboard dock houses two of the latter (more on that soon).Īfter reviewing a few ASUS netvertibles with terrible resistive touchscreens, I almost want to give the individual responsible for the Transformer’s IPS panel a big hug. It houses a mini-HDMI port, microSD card slot, and 3.5mm headphone jack. The Transformer does boast more ports than Apple's tabletīut of course, the Transformer does boast more ports than Apple’s tablet. Those numbers actually mean a lot in terms of real usability - the iPad’s thinner stature makes a distinct difference when trying to hold the tablet up for longer periods of time. 51-inch tablet is on par with its closest Honeycomb competitors, but it’s discernibly thicker than the. (I believe ASUS actually did that to accommodate a wider keyboard dock, but that’s just a guess.) In terms of thickness, the.
Oddly, it’s got a noticeably thick left and right bezel when in landscape mode, which results in it measuring 10.6 inches in length - more than a full inch longer than the iPad and. On the other hand, the plastic makes it a bit lighter than the other Honeycomb tablets out there.Īs you can see in the chart above and in some of the comparison shots, the Transformer doesn’t fare too well in size compared to the other Honeycomb tablets. That’s not to say I think it feels cheap - that’s not really how I’d describe it - but it certainty doesn’t have the same sort of rigidity as the iPad 2, Motorola Xoom, or even Acer’s Iconia A500. Instead I was surprised at the overly plastic build. Given its dapper aesthetic, I expected the tablet to feel weightier in hand and have a more solid construction. There’s no doubt that it is one nice looking tablet however, there are some discrepancies between look and actual feel here. Flip it over and its backside is much more audacious than any of the other Honeycomb tablets out there - the textured brown cover has a diamond pattern of sorts and the material has a slight sparkle to it. It’s got extremely clean lines and its edges are covered in a bronzish metal. The tablet part of the package - herein referred to as the Transformer - is a stunning piece of hardware when it’s set on a table like you see above.
But there are a few major questions: do a keyboard and touchpad add any real value to an Android slate? Is the $399 tablet a decent piece of hardware? And has ASUS finally, after so many failed attempts at creating netvertibles, been able to create a device that works as both a tablet and a netbook? Answers await in my full review! It looks and sounds like an absolutely killer package, and it’s one that certainty stands out from the cookie-cutter Honeycomb tablets out there. Shell out an extra $150 and you get a keyboard dock with an integrated battery, which transforms the tablet into your typical clamshell laptop. For $399, you get a Tegra 2-powered Honeycomb slate with a 10.1-inch IPS display. The Taiwanese company’s Eee Pad Transformer TF101 is part tablet and part netbook.
My apologies for the short netbook history lesson, but it’s ASUS’ past that makes its entry into the tablet market such an interesting one. The tale hasn’t exactly ended, but it’s certainty hit a low point - almost four years later, netbooks have lost a sizable chunk of market share to a new sort of device aiming to fill their original purpose. You know the rest of the story: it wasn’t long before other consumer electronics companies, with the help of Intel and Microsoft, started to join in and small laptops invaded the market.
That was the $399 Linux-based Eee PC - arguably the first netbook - and it became quite a hit. Back in the fall of 2007, ASUS decided there was room in people’s lives for a highly portable, secondary computer that could handle basic tasks - surfing the web, checking email, listening to music, and playing games.