"Asus TF300 Pad review"

Asus's TF300 tablet with keyboard dock will be available in in blue initially 

Is it an Android tablet? Is it a laptop? Matt Warman likes the Asus TF300, whatever it is.

Asus pioneered the netbook with the EeePC, and then challenged the iPad model for tablets with the Transformer. That shrewdly added a keyboard to the usual tablet idea, just as thousands of iPad owners were themselves buying keyboards to accessorise their tablet.

Now Asus is continuing its disruption with an affordable(ish) tablet that features high-level design but retains the keyboard and impressive specifications of much more expensive models. The software is basic Ice Cream Sandwich, the processor is quad-core and the plastic casing feels tactile rather than cheap.

Where the usual elephant in the Android tablet market place is the iPad, for the TF300 however, Asus has brought another. The biggest rival for this tablet is, in fact, Asus’s own 
Transformer Prime. Although that features a brushed metal design and a slightly faster processor, in use it feels rather than performs like a substantially more premium product. 


Its screen is far brighter, but that’s only a major issue for users who want to take their tablets outside; the TF300 is still a higher resolution than the iPad 2. The £100 difference in price between it and the Prime seems likely to be difficult to justify unless you really prefer the metal finish.

Adding a keyboard to an excellent Android tablet opens up a new world of possibilities, although it would be a mistake to think any tablet with a keyboard is yet a fully-fledged laptop replacement. Physically, the keyboard adds a trackpad and an SD and USB port, which make document editing and use a lot simpler. But Polaris Office does not quite have the feel of the Microsoft original and the tablet similarly still occasionally lags standard typing speeds. If you're happy running Photoshop's apps, then a tablet will do; if you want to download CS6, buy an ultrabook.



Overall, however, the keyboard adds five hours of excellent battery life to the eight or so I could extract from the tablet on its own, and is a really useful back-up that would in all likelihood make a number of trips for work or pleasure possible without a laptop. If you really value the flexibility of having both a standalone tablet and a netbook, the TF300 is not a compromise.


The single biggest fault is a basic ergonomic one: the weight of the unit when the tablet is docked is horribly back-heavy, making it likely to tip backwards with only the slightest provocation. Obviously, when you’re actually typing this isn’t an issue.


The tablet part of the TF300 is both excellent and in a sense unremarkable; its screen is adequate, the 8MP camera surprisingly good and the pre-loaded apps can be uninstalled if you don’t need bonus features such as 8GB of Asus’s cloud storage and the option to password protect apps. Micro-HDMI and microSD slots are handy bonuses that you certainly won’t find on an iPad, even if wireless options are rapidly challenging their usefulness. At its reasonable price, it would be perfectly justifiable to buy the tablet without the dock. Apps for Android continue to increase and improve, and in any case I still find most use for any tablet is still reading books, browsing the web and writing the odd email. And while early reviews in America suggested Ice Cream Sandwich didn’t perform perfectly on the TF300, firmware updates seem to have fixed that problem.


So the TF300 seems, in short, to make two powerful points: keyboards still have their place, and at the right price, which this currently is, a tablet makes an irresistible accessory.


Manufacturer's specifications:
Dimensions180.8x 263 x 9.9mm
Screen10.1”, 1280 x 800
Processor Cortex-A9 NVIDIA® Tegra® 3 (1.2GHz quad-core)
RAM 
1G DDR3L
Built-in Flash ROM 32GB
Front Camera 1.2MP
Rear Camera 8MP, 1080p video recording
Battery Life Pad only 10hrs
Pad + Dock 15hrs
Weight 635g