Gadgets & Gizmos

Grab the tablet and yes it feels massive at 680g, it’s much less stylish as the iPad 2, or rock-solid as the Motorola Xoom; instead the bezel would make the Transformer look wide and less sleek than it should. This is actually a device you hold with two hands.
Rather than micro USB, Asus utilizes a little-known charger, which is required to be charged via the mains. Down the bottom are two other ports, that you simply use to dock the tablet to the keyboard. Hooking up the tablet and keyboard is fairly difficult and takes several efforts to line-up and connect, but then it feels very solid, the tablet folds straight down over the keyboard and it feels (and looks) like a netbook. The keyboard is comfortable to use, certainly comparable to any netbook.
The keyboard area provides a SD card reader and also USB ports, that you can put a mouse or extra hard drive too. For reasons unknown it couldn’t read data from the USB key.
The Eee Pad Transformer will come in a WiFi only version, so no on-the-go connection yet. Choose between 16GB and 32GB capacities and you will get a years’ totally free cloud storage with Asus Webstorage.
Running Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), on the Eee Pad Transformer is a fun. Highlights include the ability to drag apps on to different homescreens, flicking via thumbnails of open homescreens and changing each screen with apps as well as widgets. The YouTube app is superb, video thumbnails are shown on a virtual 3D wall you search. Along with full 16:9 playback, you will see it in a small screen while not leaving the main interface. Browsing is a joy, the touchscreen responds nicely so you can rapidly switch between multiple browser windows. Adobe Flash support means you can run videos, including BBC iPlayer.
What lets the Eee Pad Transformer down at this time – just like any Honeycomb tablet – would be the limited number of apps. During the time of writing there are 436, when compared to 65,000 on Apple iOS. However the Android Market is improving and is certainly much better than the web. Asus has included its very own WaveShare UI to Honeycomb, with some useful features like MyNet 9 for streaming to a TV, MyLibrary and Dropbox rival MyCloud.
The 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 dualcore processor and 1GB of RAM make sure speed matches the LG Optimus Pad and Motorola Xoom overall use; it’s a bit faster at swapping angle.
Not like the Motorola Xoom, Asus has include the same IPS technology as Apple to the 10.1-inch 1280×80, which is excellent. Colors aren’t quite as natural as the iPad 2’s and even slight banding between light and dark regions is noticeable once you pause movies, but it’s normally sharp, detailed and deals with motion well, with excellent off-angle viewing. Don’t buy it for producing movies, however; the blurry 720p footage runs at a juddery 8fps, and the five-megapixel stills are no great shakes either, and there isn’t a flash either.
Battery life is a estimable nine and a half hours, in our tests along with WiFi on, screen on maximum brightness, moderate browsing and several video we quickly got six hours, also it can be long to 16 hours when docked with the keyboard as that has a battery in it as well.

Specification