First Two Weeks with an ASUS Transformer Tablet

In the editorial I posted this week tackling piracy on Android, I mentioned that I was a late-bloomer where smartphone adoption was concerned. It wasn’t that I thought I couldn’t make use of one, it’s that I didn’t want to. I was a PC hardware guy, not a mobile guy. Suffice to say, I was naive and ended up loving my smartphone a lot.

What about tablets? The thing about tablets is that I wanted one even less than I ever wanted a smartphone. When Apple released the first iPad, I laughed it off. But as so often happens, certain ideas wore me down over time. Tablets would be cool for the odd game, I guess, and to manage to-do lists, to play mahjong and best of all, to read some books.

Still… I held off – until a couple of weeks ago when I was offered an ASUS Transformer Prime at a price I couldn’t refuse. Yes, Prime, as in the TF201, the first quad-core Tegra 3 tablet on the market. When ASUS released this beast seven months ago, it was jaw-dropping, and you know what? Even with the Infinity TF700 upon us, it still is.

This article isn’t a review of the tablet, per se, though I will be talking about it. The main purpose is for me to spew off my initial impressions from using a tablet for the first two weeks – and believe me, I’ve been using this thing. While I once thought that the iPad was a foolish idea, now I’m sold that everyone should have a tablet. Oh, and I have to give credit to a good friend who assured me tablets would be future even though I disagreed with him – years before Apple released its iPad. Well played.

Even though I’ve been following tablets for a while, I haven’t used one hands-on for more than a couple of minutes. But it’s when you get to use one for a longer period that you begin to appreciate how useful one can be. It can also help you appreciate just how gorgeous and well-built some of them are.

This is especially true on the ASUS side, which is no doubt part of the reason why Google chose the company to build its Nexus 7 tablets. The TF201 is sturdy and doesn’t bend in any way. I wouldn’t want to drop it on a hard floor of course, or use it as a projectile weapon (possibly a melee weapon), but it feels like it’s built to last. It’s aesthetically-pleasing as well, if not a little classy.

The screen resolution here is common, 1280×800. On a desktop PC, that resolution would kill me, but on a tablet, it’s sufficient. The biggest bottleneck is being on a website with a super-long page, but if you’ve ever used a similar resolution on the desktop, you know just what I mean. You can always go vertical to help negate the issue.

Like ASUS’ other tablets, the TF201 can be equipped with a perfectly-matching dock, creating a tablet / notebook hybrid. In this configuration, you can use the trackpad to move a cursor around the screen (very strange at first when you have only used it as a tablet for a while), and you can use the keyboard to type easier (but oh man is it cramped!).

The other benefit is that it almost doubles the tablet’s battery-life. My only complaint? The fact that the keyboard can’t dock behind the the tablet somehow, so that people could use it like a double-width tablet.

The screen? It’s a lot better than I expected, to be honest. Colors pop, the graphics and fonts are clear. It’s also bright. Its Super IPS+ mode is meant for use outdoors, and I can see why. Turning it on cranks up the brightness to levels that wouldn’t be too comfortable indoors.

Overall, the TF201 has impressed me a lot. I’ve been using it for everything from simple apps to games and even reading. Reading actually pointed out one more flaw about the device: mild screen burn. After reading for even a half an hour, going to a flat-colored screen would reveal an obvious book pattern in the background. I’m not sure why this is, but the problem never sticks around for long (thankfully).

Enough about the tablet; let’s talk a bit about what I’ve been doing on this thing. This tablet offers me the first chance to spend a good amount of time with Ice Cream Sandwich, and compared to Fluffy Nutputty or whatever 2.2 was codenamed, I’m fairly impressed. It’s a nice step-up from 2.x, and the flexibility is just what I’d expect.

I wasn’t too crazy about the launcher that ASUS bundled with the tablet, however. It wasn’t too easy to move things around on a screen or to move something from one screen to the next, and navigating for a new widget was an eyesore of a process. Within an hour or two of turning the tablet on I was installing GO Launcher HD. If that name sounds familiar, it might be because I wrote about GO Launcher EX earlier this year, which I still love. The HD version isn’t as feature-rich as the EX variant, but it’s a stellar launcher right ouf of the gate as you’ll see on the next page.