Asus Eee Pad Transformer Review
Asus Eee Pad Transformer (16GB, Wi-Fi)
Just for $400, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer has the lowest price of any Honeycomb tablet. Also, its high-quality screen and relatively cheap keyboard – dock make it an attractive option.
A few things keep the Transformer from completely blowing us away: the choppy recording and playback of the camcorder, its sharp edges, a build quality that’s somewhat lacking and problems that arise when docking.
The Asus Eee Pad Transformer is a low-price, quality Honeycomb tablet with useful options.
Asus Eee Pad Transformer Design and features :
Before even powering up the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, we were struck by its wider-than-normal left and right bezel, each measuring about 1.1 inches. That’s a lot wider than the Motorola Xoom’s 0.5 inch bezel.
The Transformer is the longest of the new generation of tablets, measuring a full 10.7 inches in width compared with the Xoom’s 9.8 inches. Make no mistake, this is a large tablet – it’s the largest Honeycomb tablet we’ve seen.
Honeycomb
Every Android tablet we’d reviewed suffered from behaving too much like a smartphone. Google’s mobile operating system, its apps, and its developer tools were all geared for the small screen, and it showed in review.
In introduction of Android 3.0, Google is showing its commitment to tablets. With the exception of legacy support for existing Android apps, Honeycomb is a dramatic departure from the Android of smartphones.
Even experienced Android users will need time to get accustomed to Honeycomb’s navigation. Gone is the familiar (four-button) navigation across the bottom of the screen. Contextual menus and options are accessed through the top of the screen, notifications pop out from the lower right, and the trusty old back arrow will occasionally morph into a down arrow when the keyboard is engaged.
Eee Pad Transformer Performance
OS-navigating speed and app-launching speed were just as fast as on other Honeycomb tablets.However, the weather widget on the Transformer made screen transitions slightly choppy. Surfing speeds using Wi-Fi were fast, but unfortunately we weren’t able to visit any busy nonmobile sites.
Eee Pad Transformer includes a high-quality in-plane switching (IPS) screen, demonstrating a wide viewing angle. Its colors are improved over the G-Slate’s and look more accurate in the menus.
With 5 megapixels camera, picture quality was in line with previous Honeycomb tablets, but the video playback and recording was choppy with lots of dropped frames, compared with every other Honeycomb tablet. Asus already released a ROM update to improve things, but it’s still not up to the smooth quality of the other tablets. Asus says it is continuing to work with Google on this issue.
Front facing camera on the other hand, had no frame rate problems, recording images with deeper and more-accurate colors than the comparatively washed-out look of photos from the Xoom and G-Slate.
Sound on the Asus wasn’t nearly as thumping and bombastic (relatively speaking, of course, these are still tablets after all) as from either the Xoom or iPad 2, but it was an improvement over the G-Slate’s comparatively low volume.
With no high – drain cellular signal to worry about, the Transformer’s battery drained at a decent pace under normal use. Transformer claims nearly 9 hours normally and 14.5 hours connected to the dock.