Friday, April 22, 2011

Transformer, the tablet that becomes a Netbook

The good: At $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.
The bad: 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 bottom line: The Asus Eee Pad Transformer is a low-price, quality Honeycomb tablet with useful options

The bottom line: The Asus Eee Pad Transformer is a low-price, quality Honeycomb tablet with useful options

Tablets are still a hard sell to most, but one of the most important factors is price. The lower the price (without being too low to raise suspicions of quality), the more likely consumers are willing to part with their money.
At $400, the 16GB, Wi-Fi-only version of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer is the cheapest Honeycomb tablet on the market and undercuts the lowest price  iPad 2 by $100. But, what sacrifices did Asus make to get it that low?
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. We also noticed that 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, in fact.
I thought of writing a superlong paragraph detailing dimension differences between the latest tablets, but that's what charts are for. Here's a handy chart to illustrate the size differences between the Transformer and other recent tablets.

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