Asus Transformer TF300T

 

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I've been looking for a lighter laptop/netbook/notebook for awhile now. My requirements were:

An off-hand comment on Hacker News mentioned the Asus Transformer. I looked them up, and when used with the optional keyboard dock, they seemed to fit the specifications better than anything else. And on top of that, it would also give me a 10-inch Android tablet.

The one I most wanted was the newest one, the TF700T. Its display is 1920x1200. While not exceedingly expensive, though, it was a little more than I wanted to spend, somewhere around 600 dollars with the keyboard. So I waited, and eventually the TF300T came up for 300 dollars (335 all in), refurbished but with the keyboard, on Woot. I went for it, and a week later it showed up.

I love it. The keyboard dock basically turns it into a laptop, at 2.6 pounds. The tablet by itself has a 10-hour battery life, which goes up to 15 hours with the dock. It has a 10.1 inch, 1280x800 screen,a micro-SDHC slot and a micro-HDMI port on the tablet, and an SDHC slot and USB port on the dock.

It comes with 1 gig of ram and 16 gigs of storage, and I popped a 32 gig card into the tablet slot. After transcoding, MX Player plays my videos with hardware decoding, and it plays YouTube and Netflix videos great.

My biggest need is ssh and vi/vim. I tried a few options, but most didn't handle the hardware keyboard well. (This is an issue, many Android apps don't appear to notice some of the keys, particularly the ctrl key.) I ended up getting Better Terminal Emulator Pro, which understands the ctrl and tab keys, and remaps the back button (which is on the upper left of the keyboard) to esc. In addition to ssh, it also installs a vanilla vi locally which works fine.

All in all, it works great as a netbook, and if you're looking for a 10-inch tablet, I can't see buying anything other than a Transformer.


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