Asus Eee Pad Transformer Review

I bought this tablet back in July because I wanted to free myself from the lab computers. Since 99.9% of my open notebook requires cloud utilities I figured I could get away with it. I’ve been playing with it since the beginning of August so I thought I’d offer a review, it should be noted that I do not have the laptop dock which may sway my feelings on this a bit more towards the positive side.

The short: The Eee Pad Transformer is a powerful device that can handle most anything Android throws at it. I didn’t think I would use it so much as an e-reader, but that’s probably it’s best function for me. It can do a whole slew of things but in terms of using it for open science, sadly it’s just a giant phone. This isn’t to say it doesn’t have its uses, but it is a little too clumsy to use it for much in the lab outside of answering emails on the go, reading papers, and occasionally blogging (notice I said occasionally). While I do like it, I still much prefer the 5 year old laptop I use in lab and my phone (Droid Bionic) to using this in the lab. (Caveat: Until this week I had an OG Droid and that thing was atrocious, so I used the tablet more. But the Bionic has the same specs (maybe better!) than the Transformer so it is starting to fall by the wayside.)

The Full Review: I bought the 16GB, wifi version of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer. It’s only real flaw is that it has a goofy name (please remove the Eee and Pad parts Asus!). It is loaded with Android 3.2 (Honeycomb), has 16GB storable memory, 1GB RAM, 1GHz dual core processor and comes with an HDMI port and a Micro SDHC card slot (to expand the memory). The company claims there are 2 USB ports and a regular SD card slot but those must be on the laptop doc.

The tablet also gets excellent battery life. I typically charge it up once every 2/3 days depending on how much I use it. The day I received the tablet I used it for about 16 hours straight! I did everything there was to do and it lasted from morning until night. Unfortunately my hygiene that day wasn’t too spectacular…

The performance is really good as well. The tablet switches between apps quickly and can keep several apps in memory for a while. There are times when I have had about 10 apps running at once and can easily switch between any of them. The only problem I have had is with Adobe Reader. It seems to be really slow when you use pinch-to-zoom, and the pdf’s take a long time to load (it seems to load pages in blocks as if it were a big image). I’ve also encountered a few low memory errors when reading. These problems though may be the app itself rather than the tablet because I’ve read a couple of reviews that mentioned this error.

The tablet came with a few apps of its own that aren’t in the android market. There is an Asus cloud app that provides you free cloud storage for a year (a la DropBox) and let’s you remote desktop your computer or laptop from the tablet. Asus claims that the Transformer can be synced with both Mac and PC but as of the time of this writing only the PC option is available and that goes the same for the remote desktop functionality.

There is also an office suite that is (supposedly) compatible with office, but I’m a Google Docs person so I wouldn’t know about that. It also comes with it’s own e-reader app but it works only slightly better than adobe reader so I don’t use it that frequently.

The Transformer has a front and rear camera. The front camera is pretty useful for video calling. The rear camera is a 5MP camera, but the size of the tablet makes it awkward to take pictures. I also don’t think the software for taking images is very functional. The shutter is slow and you have very limited control of camera functions. I haven’t tried it for video yet, but I have a couple projects coming up that will be great for video that I could try the tablet on.

My biggest pet peeve with the tablet is typing. The stock Asus/Android keyboard has both Swype style typing and sentence prediction typing like Swiftkey X. Neither of these works very well and I would say the swiping keyboard doesn’t work at all. Because of this typing is awkward. If you hold it like a phone your thumbs won’t reach the middle buttons. If you hold it with one hand you have to regress to the primitive style typing you learned when you first touched a keyboard (the finger poking of doom!). Holding the tablet in portrait mode (vertically) is really the only compromise, but for some reason I just don’t like it.

With that said, I really like using the tablet over using a phone. The larger screen makes surfing the web and reading academic papers much easier and more comfortable than a phone, and obviously more portable than a laptop/desktop (funny how laptops now a days aren’t that portable anymore). The abundance of apps in the app market provide the tablet with more functionality than it would right out of the box. The front and rear cameras have their uses and could be made more useful in the lab environment. Surfing the web is a breeze (as it should be) and reading papers are now ultra portable. While typing is annoying it is tolerable in small blocks.

I still think tablet computing has a ways to go to integrate themselves into societies technological hands, but if you need a tablet now the Asus Eee Pad Transformer has a place in the lab. At $400 the Transformer is the best bang for your buck and you really can’t go wrong. Even though I haven’t tested the keyboard dock, I think it is definitely worth the extra ~$100 to make typing a little easier and more comfortable. Hopefully science on the web catches up and the Android Market becomes host to plenty of excellent science apps that makes owning a tablet even more worthwhile!