This one’s a bit late (the device was released more than 6 months ago), but let’s just say that I’m not an early adopter when it comes to tablets. It was my wife’s birthday a few months ago, and given her usage of computers in general (email, a bit of excel, youtube), a tablet felt like a good idea.

To quickly summarize, the Eee Transformer *Disclaimer’ Affiliate link( was spot-on, probably the best choice I could come up with. It has a great design (the first thing my wife noticed! Guys, take that into account!!!), a nice price, good performances, good support, and lots of features that other tablets don’t have.

First of all, the target audience of a Tablet is easily summarized by a comment I once saw somewhere on the net: Tablets are great for content consumers, not for content producers. The Eee transformer does not change this rule. If your goal is to create graphics, movies, documents, programs, etc… well stop right here, because what you need is a computer. If, on the other hand, you want to do a bit of email, casual gaming, organize your photos (and show them to your family), and watch movies…then the Eee transformer might be exactly what you want.

My wife is mostly on the consumer side, except maybe once in a while she does some excel, which is one of the two things the tablet couldn’t replace compared to her old computer (more below).

Design and features

What impressed my wife at a first glance was the great look of the device itself. It has a metallic case with a “dark brown” type of color… honestly it’s the most stylish tablet I’ve seen, and props for not going with the stereotypical black or aluminum colors.

With the eee Transformer and a bottle of Champagne, you can pretend you're rich and classy.

For my part, what I saw was the good amount of ports (usb ports, multi-format card slot, micro sd, hdmi output), and the dock/keyboard. That keyboard is the specificity of the Eee transformer, and probably what makes it so successful. It’s primarily a keyboard, which connects smoothly to the tablet, and helps people who are migrating away from a laptop to be in known territory. All the keys you need are here, including a trackpad which can entirely replace the need for a touch screen. It is also used as a dock, which helps maintaining the tablet in a vertical position without having to hold it, but also gives extra battery to the device, and provides additional ports. One of my main concerns was the solidity of this device, and how easy it would be to remove/attach the tablet. The answer is: after the first couple times, it’s a bliss. Attaching the screen is done by simply pushing the tablet in the dock. The drivers are automatically loaded, and it simply works. Taking it off is done by pushing a button, and that’s it (if you’ve ever had to use a dock with a windows laptop, the experience on the Transformer is way better).

Installation

Setup of the device is easy as well. If you’ve never used Android before, the basic steps are to provide your google account credentials (or create one if you don’t have one yet), and connect to your Wifi. That’s it. After being connected, the Transformer located a Firmware update, which installed quickly. That update was a necessary step for us, as it installed the nvidia tegra drivers, which made a huge difference in some games and on youtube.

Applications

This is where experience will differ from one person to the other. We’ve been using this device for more than two months now, enough to know what works and what doesn’t.

The video below shows how cool you can become if you get a tablet from Asus.

Skype on Android in general is fishy, and the Transformer is not different. The experience is overall ok, with some flaws. We’ve seen cases where the device would take dozens of minutes before realizing one of your contacts went online. The menus didn’t feel super intuitive, but once it works, it works great. The front camera allowed us to have very smooth video conversations with family and friends. At some point we would have loved to have more power in the integrated speakers, but that was mostly because the mic used by the other guys wasn’t good. Speaking of cameras, the rear camera is quite useless, and from what we’ve seen, of bad quality. It’s not good enough to replace a standard digital camera, has a terrible latency and not such a great framerate. I wonder why they even included it. But the front camera (the one you’ll use for skype) does its job very well.

Casual gaming is great. I don’t think any game on the android market now requires more than what the Eee tranformer has. We could play lots of high resolution 3D games with no problem at all. The tablet ships with an embedded “Nvidia” application with special 3D games…kind of a cool “elite subset” of the android market. And for those who wonder, yes, Wagic works great on it.

Email on the tablet is good, although the gmail app is recommended, rather than the gmail website. There’s basically a bug in the android default browser which makes the keyboard painfully slow once in a while (if you’ve ever had a slow javascript code running on a web page, you’ll see what I mean). Nothing much to say, I think tablets are great for casual email, and the integrated keyboard of the eee transformer makes it even better.

Videos and photos are simply awesome on this tablet. The tablet is a perfect way to quickly show a funny video, or browse in the youtube recommendations. The tablet also has HDMI output, which is very nice for youtube, and also to show photos on a big TV screen. However we’ve seen some sites (with Flash videos) not optimized for this dual output, and in this case the result was way too slow when thetablet was plugged to the TV (it was ok on the tablet alone). Photos browsing is nice, especially with the amount of ports offered by the tablet. We can connect our digital camera through USB, or simply put the memory card in the tablet’s slot. USB devices, etc… are automatically recognized, but it’s sometimes not very intuitive, as not all apps will recognize external devices. Several times, I’ve had to go to the “manager” application, and open the photos from there, or copy them onto the tablet before being able to see them in a 3rd party application, etc… Overall it is ok, but there are a few glitches between applications.

Web browsing is also very good, although honestly I wasn’t impressed. Once in a while, a site will refuse to work (those sites that only work with IE, etc…), and sometimes it can be blocking (“checkout” button not working on some Japanese shopping sites, etc…). In these cases, we have to switch to firefox, or, more often than we’d like to, boot the old computer again. But when the site has no weird javascript, the experience is great (we’ve found it very useful to display a recipe website while cooking, discuss about the plans for the next day while using google maps, etc…). We’ve found that typing Japanese on the physical keyboard sometimes wasn’t working in some websites. It is always possible to use the on-screen keyboard in these cases, but hopefully Asus will fix this in a future update.

Asus also offers some additional services such as a (non free) cloud storage system… I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s nice to know it’s here. It’s also worth mentioning that Asus announced this tablet would get an upgrade for Ice Cream Sandwich (Android’s latest version), which is super cool 🙂

Conclusion

As a conclusion, this didn’t fully replace my wife’s computer because she needs to use excel (the “office” application pre-installed on the tablet doesn’t quite do it yet, and my wife is not ready to use google docs), and some sites are still best used on a computer. Other than that, the Eee Transformer has become in a few weeks my wife’s main computer. It turns on instantly, which is a great selling point (ok, raise your hand if your girlfriend constantly uses your computer because “booting her own computer” takes too long), requires almost no configuration, has all apps accessible very quickly, etc…

The docking keyboard is also one of the main selling points of this tablet. The tablet is good without the keyboard too, but the keyboard is what makes it really different from other tablets. The tablet costs about 400$, and 500$ with the keyboard. Those of you who are ready to pay much more might wait a few days, the second version of this tablet, called the Eee Transformer prime, will come out in a few days and has incredible specs (and it’s been getting awesome reviews so far).

I bought this tablet after comparing it to two other tablets, the Motorola Xoom (too heavy, too expensive, power button and volume buttons impractical) and the LG Optimus (too expensive, 2 front cameras for 3D are a useless gadget). I think ASUS is doing great by trying very hard to offer something that is not copying everybody else (especially the iPad 2), offering as a result something that is closer (for me) to the experience I’m expecting from a tablet.

I strongly recommend the Eee Pad Transformer.

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