Asus Transformer Review

I've been using the transformer for almost two months. I'm going to make this review very simple and brief, in the form of lists. I'm coming from a background of using a PC for about 14 years, Mac for 4, android phone for 2, and very briefly linux distros. The current iteration of the OS is Honeycomb 3.2.


What I love about the Transformer, above other competitors.

• Clean, simple interface. Compared to Windows or OSX, android is uncluttered and easy to navigate.
• Gmail. The app has made managing multiple e-mail accounts a breeze. I no longer have to log out, and then log back in. I just have a drop down menu of my e-mail accounts, and I get notifications for whichever ones I want.
• Mounting/dismounting. I can have a MicroSD card in the tablet, but choose not to have it mounted, and so not have some nosy fellow looking through my documents. Classic linux feature.
• The tablet portion separates from the dock! This feature is fantastic. The dock has its own battery. The combined battery life of tablet and dock at moderately high use and with wifi constantly on, is enough to last me almost two days. If I were travelling and using wifi sparingly, it would last much longer.
• Unlike the vast majority of full keyboard laptops that i've used, every single button on the top row of the transformer works flawlessly. When connected to the dock, only the dock battery will deplete, while the tablet battery will stay at 100%. Only when the dock is depleted, will the tablet begin to use its battery. This allows you to use the transformer all day, and then take off the tablet portion and continue using it as if it had just been charged. The netbooks I've seen have trouble keeping a battery for even most of the day at intense usage.
• Market. I wasn't sure whether to put this in to the next category, since iPads can do this too. But iPads aren't netbooks, while the transformer sort of is. This is a feature that makes finding new apps and managing installed apps much easier.
• Remote desktop control. Asus has included for free what looks like a paid app, to control any PC (and I think Mac too, though I have yet to try it). I feel like I'm in the future, standing with a tablet and controlling the PC. It's a pretty clever app. When I play music from the PC, it mutes the PC's speakers and plays through the tablet's speakers.
• Flash! Works just fine in Dolphin HD browser. I can watch youtube videos in the browser, or any other streaming .flv file. Same for websites that use flash. It almost always works, and the Flash app gets updated quite regularly.
• Google maps on a 10 inch touch screen is awesome.

What the transformer is equally good at as other operating systems/netbooks.

• 2 USB slots gives me the ability to plug in a hard drive, or anything else that uses USB.
• Evernote. If you haven't used this app, give it a go. It's brings new meaning to cloud documents. You are able to keep notes synced with all your computers and phones. Sharing notes with others, and collaborating on projects is also doable (though I havent tried). Until Google comes out with an app for Google Docs, this is a good alternative.
• Cloud printing! All it took was setting up Chrome on a pc connected to the printer, and now I can cloud print from my tablet to that printer, wherever I am in the world. This just made faxing even more obsolete.
• Google Talk works with the camera! While Skype still hasn't come out with video chat, Google Talk has proved that it's not a hardware limitation, but just Skype being incompetent.
• No built in 3G. But this isn't a problem if you have an android phone on a contract. All you need to do is create a hotspot and you can easily share your phone's 3G connection with the Transformer. I think this is actually preferable to having a separate contract and sim card.
• Typing on the tablet touch screen is quite a good experience. I can easily change between different languages, and autocorrect seems to work for all the ones I've tried so far.
• Torrents work very well with tTorrent Lite, though it has an annoying habbit of re-checking files too frequently, rather than just downloading.
• There is finally an app that takes advantage of Tegra 2 hardware acceleration, and plays every .mkv file I've thrown at it. At this point I believe I can get the transformer to smoothly play every single video file format I have ever come across. Not sure about 1080p, not tried it yet.
• Online banking works just fine. No issues here.

What the transformer can handle, but is better done on a PC or a Mac.

• Hard drive space. The Asus Transformer comes in two models: 16gb or 32gb. Neither sports the kind of capacity that Asus's windows netbooks have. Sure, this storage is faster, and probably more reliable, but in order to be able to obtain the same capacity, you have to use both the MicroSD slot in the tablet, and the SD slot in the dock. 32gb MicroSDHC cards and 128gb SDXC cards are very expensive.
• Office work. The Asus Transformer comes with Polaris office, which is quite decent. You can view or edit 2003/2007 Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files. Creating new files works well too, though many of the formatting options like headers are noticeably absent.
• Blogging. I'm writing this on a PC. I could write it on the transformer, but it would be somewhat uncomfortable. Either the browsers/OS need to be improved, or Google needs to make a Blogger app for tablets and phones.

What the transformer can't handle.

• Internet .avi file streaming. On windows you usually have Divx web player. Android has no such app yet to my knowledge.
• The dock keyboard currently has no autocorrect feature. Typing at high speed, even with a good keyboard, can lead to mistakes, and you're going to have to look through them manually.
• Ctrl + arrow will not move the cursor a word at a time, and ctrl + backspace won't delete an entire word. This is quite annoying when working with the dock, since you have to constantly reach out to the screen, or tap/hold the arrow keys for a while. Both of these keyboard problem could easily be solved with a software or firmware update.

Bottom line is, the Transformer tries to be both a tablet and a netbook at once. The hardware is there to succeed, but the software needs some more work.

As a tablet, it is fully featured, handles flash well, has by now many apps to choose from, etc.
As a netbook, it needs some more work to be able to compete with Windows netbooks. Luckily for everyone who has already purchased a Transformer, this is something that will hopefully improve over time.

When it comes to most things, I can say that as it stands, the Transformer is able to replace other computers in my day to day activities, and indeed does.



disclaimer: I have not been paid, nor do I have a vested interest in advertising any of the apps mentioned above. If I've mentioned them, it's because I think they're good.