Tablet PCs might be the next big thing, but they still sit in an uncomfortable place in terms of productivity. They work best as devices for media consumption, be that reading ebooks, surfing the web or watching videos. For getting work done, though, a touchscreen interface is nowhere near as efficient as a keyboard and mouse (or trackpad) combo. The ASUS Eee Pad Transformer is one solution — a 10.1in Android 3.0 tablet bundled with a keyboard/mouse dock that effectively ‘transforms’ it into a netbook-style PC. The two parts lock together solidly via the tablet’s data/charge port with a sliding lock mechanism.
For light productivity tasks, the dock works respectably well — having external peripherals lets you use the whole screen, rather than having half of it obscured by an onscreen keyboard, and it’s decently sized and comfortable to type on. The trackpad adds basic mousing abilities and better precision, although since Android is touchscreen optimised, it has no real right-click function; it emulates the Back button here.
The dock also has two USB ports, so you can plug in a real mouse; we found it useful, as it allowed scrolling in web pages via the mouse wheel. We found that native Android apps, such as the bundled Polaris Office suite, tend to work best with the dock’s peripherals. If you’re a fan of web-based apps like Google Docs, however, we found these generally work OK in netbook mode, but suffer from some small yet annoying quirks. For instance, the keyboard’s arrow keys wouldn’t let us move the cursor around in web text boxes and there was some lag in typed characters appearing onscreen. To be fair, the latter problem is likely caused by many web apps not being built for Android’s mobile web browser, but it’s something to consider.
As a tablet, the Transformer is solidly built and quite attractive, but it has a slightly bigger footprint than most 10.1in models and it weighs in at a middling 690g. That’s 90g more the iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1v (both are around 600g). However, the larger footprint distributes the weight very evenly and we didn’t find the Transformer too taxing to hold, even one-handed. On the downside, the dock brings the total weight up to 1.33kg, though you do get an extra 6 hours of battery life (around 15-16 hours total) from the dock’s built-in battery.
The tablet also has a built-in HDMI output port and a microSD slot so you can add more storage. In other respects, the Transformer is much like other 10.1in models: it uses a dual-core Tegra 2 chip, comes in 16GB and 32GB types (both with 1GB of RAM) and packs a decent screen with good viewing angles. It’s worth pointing out that while it ships with Android 3.0, ASUS has since released an over-the-air update to version 3.1 for the Transformer. All our testing was done with the new version and we found it improved stability and responsiveness compared to the 3.0 tablets we’ve used, and it’s reassuring to see ASUS being so proactive with updates.
