Asus has announced the Transformer Book T100, an update to its Eee PC lines running a cutting edge Intel Bay Trail processor. Here’s my early impressions.
Like my other hands-on reviews, these are just early impressions; when I get some proper testing time I can come to proper conclusions.
The Asus Transformer Book T100’s base specifications suggest it should be pretty decent; an Intel Atom Bay Trail-T Z3740 quad-core processor runs its 10.1 inch IPS display, and the viewing angles from my brief bit of time with it seem pretty good.
It’s a Transformer because the keyboard clips on or off (adding a bit of weight as it does so), although as the video shows this isn’t something that’ll drop off all that easily. That’s a plus in most aspects.
The inclusion of Office is also decent. It’s only the Home & Student Edition, but then this is still a budget system at its heart, and one where the US pricing is fairly decent. No word yet on Australian availability, but in the US when it goes on sale it’ll cost $349 for the 32GB version or $399 for the 64GB variant.
There are a few worrying design decisions. All the ports are micro versions, which mean MicroSD rather than full sized SD, MicroHDMI instead of HDMI and so on. This is a 10.1″ device, which means it’s not small; having to work with these kinds of size restrictions feels like it could be limiting.
Asus releases a lot of products, and some of them are great value, and some of them are not, because some Asus systems feel a fair bit less than premium. The Asus Transformer Book T100 dodges the “feels cheap” bullet, and I’d be keen to see how well it lives up to its claimed 11 hour usage billing — but for now it seems like a fairly solid product.