I bought the 32GB Asus Transformer Eee Pad Transformer (with a 32GB microSD card) with the keyboard dock. I rarely use the keyboard dock other than to charge the tablet because it makes the Transformer rather bulky to carry around.
It seems like it’d be nice for throwing it in a bag or whatever, though – keep the screen from getting cracked.
How well does the keyboard/trackpad integrate with Android? Does it feel bizarre and unnatural to use it in that mode, or is it pretty reasonable?
Unlike Eric, my keyboard dock is on my Transformer almost all of the time, especially when travelling with it. The keyboard and trackpad work really well even in Honeycomb on the Transformer. The only complaint I have is that the trackpad is too sensitive (it is easy to accidentally tap it while typing causing it to do something you didn’t really want to do). Hopefully they’ve addressed this for the Prime(?) because it is a common complaint.
So, how’s the trackpad work, anyway? I mean, there’s no cursor in Android, so what does it do?
It actually adds a cursor for you to move around and point at things. It is profoundly weird, but I guess you get used to it.
So is the cursor like a surrogate finger? I.e., clicking the button is like tapping your finger? Or is it supported through some alternate code path, such that the finger and cursor aren’t necessarily identical in behavior?
(And wouldn’t it be just as easy to touch the screen itself? I get the importance of a keyboard, but the trackpad seems a little out of place.
You can also plug in a mouse into one of the two USB ports as well.
If I was using the spreadsheet software I could see myself using the keyboard/mouse pad for selecting groups of cells and stuff like that.
The cursor is somewhat like a surrogate finger, yes, to the point where early versions of Honeycomb made it a regular looking mouse arrow but then they changed it at 3.1 so that it was a circle (to basically better show you the hit area that would correspond to a finger).
You can still just touch the screen if you like, hooking up the keyboard dock doesn’t prevent you from using the touchscreen as normal. I tend to use the trackpad fairly often when I’m docked though just because if I’m typing my fingers are already down there.
Also the trackpad supports multitouch so things like a double finger swipe will scroll the active scroll area, etc, like a modern Apple or Windows 7 laptop (again, you could also just flick/swipe the screen, but it tends to be ergonomically simpler to just do this via the trackpad if you’re also typing).
Huh, interesting.
So, random question: Can you put the tablet in the dock backwards? One of the things I like doing with my TabletPC is swiveling the screen around 180 degrees, but then leaving it at an angle; it’s like having a stand that’ll prop it up for you, and is good for reading while set on a table or whatever.
Nope. It only attaches in one direction.
Review embargo just lifted, and all the expected sites have their reviews (or at least previews; seems like they didn’t get review units too far in advance) up. Probably the most thorough is AnandTech’s.
The general conclusion of most of them is that the thing is great. Everyone loves the screen, which is universally described as the best tablet screen out there – brighter than any other screen, better black levels, usable in the sunlight, and with excellent off-axis viewing. Everyone loves the design of it, and describes it as being very high-quality, thin, light, and with a stylin’ aluminium back that makes it feel classy.
Performance-wise, it does great on synthetic tests, as you’d expect. On real world tests, the advantage isn’t always so obvious, but it’s still up at the top of the charts, sometimes significantly so. It does lag the iPad 2 in GPU performance (which, you’d think Nvidia would be good at that, but apparently not), but it’s vastly better than Tegra 2 and iPad 1, so that’s really just a case where Apple got out ahead of the curve. (CPU performance is, of course, better than the iPad 2.)
Surprising thing to me: It’s supposed to work with wired PS3/360 controllers. Huh. That could be sorta cool.
Reviews are mixed about the dock. Some of them love it and say it rivals the Macbook Air’s keyboard; others say it’s too cramped to be really good for typing.
Battery life measurements are all over the place, from 5 hours one place to over 10 hours at another place, with Anandtech coming down in the middle at 8 hours. It seems to me that the results are VERY sensitive to what they’re using as their test material – video playback appears to hand everything off to the low-power companion core, so gives you the 10+ hour number; things that exercise the tablet more fully take it down to one degree or another. Everyone says that the dock basically doubles the battery life, which means that if you’re using it as a semi-laptop, your absolute worst case torture-test number is 10 hours, and you’re almost certainly closer to 15-20. Seems pretty good to me.
Honeycomb is Honeycomb. All the reviewers clearly want ICS, and Asus has promised that they’ll get it on there ASAP.
Most troubling thing: Anandtech had a problem with the Wifi, and PCMag appeared to have a similar issue. Both of them were told it was a defective unit, but when two reviewers have defective units in the same way, it’s sort of troubling. Still, pre-release units, right?
It’s shipping the 19th, although reports vary on whether preorders will go out before then or that week. I’ve got mine preordered, and it sounds pretty damn good to me.
Amazon just cancelled my preorder, and those of enough other people to make it to Engadget. It looks like Asus is not going to have nearly enough supply at launch (and who the heck launches a new tablet on December 19th, just in time to not be there for Christmas?). Maddening!
Yeah, in terms of launching, this has already been a massive failure. I’m beginning to suspect we won’t see this here in Norway before February, by which time all the buzz will be about the next big thing.
Seriously, why is every competent IT marketing manager employed by Apple?
It’s less a marketing problem, and more of a “making the damn tablets” problem, it looks like. They pretty clearly meant to start shipping these in November, and obviously something prevented that from happening, which is unfortunate.
But yeah, without a preorder, it looks like I’d be into January as well, so I guess it’ll come down to seeing what’s announced then.
I wonder if the supply issues are due to the wi-fi problem mentioned in the AnandTech review?
Anyway, the Transformer Prime form factor is exactly what I want out of a Windows 8 machine. Hopefully that form factor becomes the norm for both ARM and x86 - all the guts in the screen, and just a “dumb” keyboard that also provides extra battery life.
It’s possible. I suspect it’s a mix of being the first Tegra 3 device out there, and being just being caught flat-footed by demand – apparently the original Transformer was hard to get for a while, too.
How does the Android Marketplace determine which market to use? I know that whenever I try to go to the PC android marketplace it always defaults me to the Japan store (since I’m living in Japan) and I can’t find anyway to change that. When I made an Appstore account I set my location as Canada so whenever I browse the iTunes Appstore I’m always looking at the Canadian app store. If I were to get a tablet, is there any way I could set it so that I could view the Canadian (or American) marketplace? The reason for this is because Japanese people tend to get fucked in the ass when it comes to pricing and Japanese app taste tends to be completely different from mine (ie. shitty) so that might be a determining factor about whether to get an iOS tablet or Android tablet.