It looks and sounds like an absolutely killer package, and it’s one that certainty stands out from the cookie-cutter Honeycomb tablets out there.
Shell out an extra $150 and you get a keyboard dock with an integrated battery, which transforms the tablet into your typical clamshell laptop. For $399, you get a Tegra 2-powered Honeycomb slate with a 10.1-inch IPS display. The Taiwanese company’s Eee Pad Transformer TF101 is part tablet and part netbook. My apologies for the short netbook history lesson, but it’s ASUS’ past that makes its entry into the tablet market such an interesting one. The tale hasn’t exactly ended, but it’s certainty hit a low point - almost four years later, netbooks have lost a sizable chunk of market share to a new sort of device aiming to fill their original purpose. You know the rest of the story: it wasn’t long before other consumer electronics companies, with the help of Intel and Microsoft, started to join in and small laptops invaded the market.
That was the $399 Linux-based Eee PC - arguably the first netbook - and it became quite a hit. It’s the kind of spacing you could get used to over time, but it didn’t feel natural from the get-go.Back in the fall of 2007, ASUS decided there was room in people’s lives for a highly portable, secondary computer that could handle basic tasks - surfing the web, checking email, listening to music, and playing games. They worked, but were not as comfortable to type on compared with the keys on the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet Keyboard Folio Case I had to adjust my hands a lot more to accommodate the spacing. The island-style keys are small and cramped, practically the same as what you’d find on an Asus netbook. I found typing on the Transformer dock to be mixed, unfortunately. Usually, a device combination like this–with all the “guts” in the screen–ends up being top-heavy and easy to tip backward, but in my tests the Transformer stayed firmly in place, even when I tilted the screen back a good ways.
The hinge also rotates down as you raise the tablet into the “open” position, which lifts the keyboard to a nice angle for typing. You won’t need any extra stands or folding cases. And having the whole thing fold together is a design advantage for when you’re pulling the keyboard/tablet combo out of your bag for going through airport security, for example.Īnother major advantage of the laptop-like hinge that connects the Transformer to its dock is the fact that it holds the tablet up. When you want to do some work on your novel, you just plug it back in. So for those times you just want to put your feet up and swipe your way through the Internet, you can leave the keyboard behind. But this keyboard can do one neat thing a netbook keyboard can’t: It comes off. That makes the whole kit similar in size, weight, and thickness to your average netbook.
The keyboard also adds a lot of bulk to an already heavy tablet–a full 1.4 pounds and 1.1 inches, to be exact. I found this issue most noticeable when I folded the tablet down over the keyboard for transport: Whereas you would expect a laptop to fold solidly in half, with the screen edges sitting flush with the edges of the bottom portion, the Transformer didn’t line up as nicely with its keyboard. Despite the large connecting port, the latch, and the wide hinge, however, the tablet still has a lot of room to wobble back and forth. A release latch slides into place to secure it.
The tablet slots into a rotating hinge at the back, and connects via a 40-pin dock connector. The Transformer TF101 Mobile Docking Station ($150 of March 7, 2012) is a must-have accessory for your Transformer, and not just because it gives you the ability to type on a physical keyboard. The Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 tablet gets its name from the keyboard dock add-on that transforms the tablet into a laptop-like device.