Google’s Android Honeycomb is a revolutionary operating system specially designed and optimized for tablets, and enables users a full web experience for on-the-go web browsing, communicating and casual computing. Supporting Adobe® Flash® 10.2*² and the ever growing Android Market, entertainment is a finger swipe away.


The convenient ASUS Launcher also allows users to easily launch software, manage content and access online services and connect devices with a few simple taps. 

It's a classy product though, more so than we initially expected from Asus after encountering Motorola's and Samsung's rival tablets at January 2011's CES conference. Build quality is great, and the sides of its body are tastefully minimal, in contrast to the rather laden (but feature-packed) swiss army knife-style Archos 101. On the right edge are the 3.5mm headphone jack, miniHDMI slot, microSD slot and a very low-key speaker grille. The big surprise about this tablet is that there's no standard USB on the tablet itself. Instead there's a proprietary connector that doubles as both power point and USB connector. This sits on the bottom edge of the tablet. Some will hate the merging of power and data transfer duties into a single proprietary connector (indeed we err towards this ourselves), but it does give the Eee Pad Transformer a hint of that Apple flavour - that taste of simplicity.

Battery life

We really didn't have the Transformer long enough to be able to draw any firm conclusions about its battery life. Our time was spent plugging it in and out of the keyboard dock -- which functions as an extra battery pack that recharges the tablet's own cell when the two are paired -- whose impact muddied the waters. What we can say is that we bid goodbye to the charger on Saturday night, tinkered and messed with the Transformer during the evening, left Gmail to auto-update itself, and by noon the next day the battery was down to 60 percent. 13 hours of idle time chewing through 40 percent of the battery isn't outstanding, but it does project to round about 30 hours of standby time. ASUS has done extensive testing and claims you'll be able to squeeze nearly 10 hours of HD video playback (both 720p and 1080p) out of the Transformer, and when we actually put it to use with browsing, taking pictures, listening to music, and the like, the tablet held up well.

A 30-minute video clip we watched on the BBC iPlayer website (the app wouldn't work for us, for whatever reason) cost us 10 percent of the battery's charge, though we were a little greedy and raised brightness to about 70 percent. Extrapolating that out to the battery's full capacity, we get a pretty impressive five hours of juice. That's impressive because we're talking about in-browser Flash video streaming, the traditional enemy of portable devices' endurance. We're therefore very much inclined to believe ASUS' numbers are legit, though we'll naturally report back if we find anything to disprove them. The keyboard dock is also rated to extend battery performance by another six hours or thereabouts. Something often overlooked about tablets is their general neediness to be held and kept upright, which can be a real pain when watching movies. The dock's sturdy hinge and extra battery juice score a synergistic point for ASUS by providing both a solid platform with adjustable viewing angles and an extended running time for the movie lover on the go. Good stuff.

Other features include Wi-Fi, GPS and dual cameras, it's just 3G that's missing in this first edition.

Demo: