Asus Eee Pad Transformer review

A big advantage of Android 3.0 is that it supports Flash, so lets you view pretty much every website. Flash isn’t always very efficient, though, so it’s worth setting the browser to load it only on demand. This makes general web browsing much better. Even then, we found that the browser would occasionally crash, deleting all of the open tabs with no recovery options. Crashes were few and far between, but Android 3.0 is clearly in need of a couple of updates to make it more stable.

We weren’t very impressed with the rear-facing 5-megapixel camera. We found that still shots were quite noisy, with soft details. Video is the really disappointing part – the Eee Pad Transformer is completely incapable of shooting smooth video. All our test footage was incredibly jerky and basically unusable.

Switching to the 1.2-megapixel front camera produced smoother video, but then you’re limited to shooting footage of yourself, or guessing where you’re pointing the camera. The jerky footage feels more like a software issue than a fundamental hardware flaw.

It’s good to see that GPS is built in, so you can use location aware apps, such as Google Maps, when you’re out and about if you tether the tablet to your mobile phone over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to provide a data connection.

We were pleased to see the My Library eBook reader app. This scans the tablet’s storage automatically looking for compatible books. It will work with ePub and PDF files, and can read encrypted documents if you sign into your Adobe Digital Editions account.

We found that it would read our encrypted PDF test file, but it didn’t handle it particularly well. If you zoom into one page, it doesn’t reformat the text to make it bigger, and it only remembers settings for one page; when you change to the next page you have to set up the zoom level again. EPub handling is much better and zooming in resizes the format and reformats the page. However, it didn’t work with one of our purchased books and crashed.

It’s the keyboard dock that will garner this tablet a fair amount of interest. Once you’ve clicked the tablet firmly into place, it can fold flat against the keyboard, turning the Eee Pad Transformer into a netbook. The keyboard dock is exactly the same size as the tablet, adding 680g to the weight and 13mm to the height. With a total weight of 1.34kg, it’s similar to a standard netbook. In some ways it’s better than a netbook, as it’s quicker to respond and the IPS panel is both better and has a higher resolution than the screen on an average 10.1in netbook.