Laptop Thoughts: News & Reviews on Laptops, Netbooks, Slates, and More.

"As the name would suggest, there is much more than meets the eye with the Asus Eee Pad Transformer. The tablet’s spec sheet reads nearly identical to its biggest Android-powered competitor, the Motorola Xoom. Both are powered by NVIDIA’s incredibly capable dual-core Tegra 2 processor, augmented with 1GB of RAM, and enter the market amidst significant hype. "

If you like the portability of tablets, but find yourself sometimes in need of some more heavy text input, the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer may be what you are looking for. The specs are nice and about as speedy as one would expect any pricey Android tablet to be, but the big draw for the Transformer of any other tablet is its optional keyboard dock. A standard dock would raise questions with me, as if you are doing enough data entry to need a keyboard, would you not be better served with a netbook or Macbook Air? And at the price of the keyboard dock and the tablet, you are already in that price range. Still, it is an interesting addition, and it might be an indication of the netbook of the future. I read reports that the original netbooks that had Linux installed were often returned in favour of Windows based ones. With the market, consumers and expectations much different now, a netbook might be seen as no longer needing a traditional desktop OS.

"The ASUS Eee Pad Transformer is seeing early action in the UK as we saw somebody unbox one the other day and now ASUS UK has their own walkthrough videos touching on various features of the tablet hybrid."

First video provides information on hardware features. Quite impressive!

I'm impressed by how rock-solid everything looks. It seems like the tablet really is locked-into the dock.

Game playing is quite impressive, excellent performance, and sound quality.

Lastly, some information on apps. Android Market is fully supported on this Honeycomb system.

Not a lot of information is available on release schedules for North America, but some early pricing shows that the tablet and dock will probably be sold and priced separately, with the tablet priced at about $400 for the 16GB model (about $500 for the 32GB model) and the dock (keyboard and ports) priced at about $150. ASUS appears to understand that they need to beat the iPad 2 and their Android competition on price, and offer compelling features to potential buyers. After looking at these videos, I personally think that this could be a very, very serious competitor in both the tablet and netbook markets. This is a likely candidate for my first Android device!