Mentor Monday: The Asus Transformer

This is the Asus Transformer.

It's a great tool for writers on the go.
It has a fabulously textured surface, and a lovely, coppery color.
It looks like a netbook, and weighs about 1.5 pounds.
When it's closed, it's compact and feels substantial.

It has 93% size keyboard . . .

and a fabulous screen -- a nifty 10.1 inch display area with a tasteful black bezel. The glass is scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass from Corning.



Yes, it does look like a netbook, but looks can be deceiving!

The Transformer is an Android Honeycomb tablet with a docking keyboard.

You can read books on it!

The Transformer tablet runs Nvidia's 1GHZ dual-core Terra 2 Platform with 1GB of RAM. No Gs though -- 3G or 4G. It does have Wifi and lots of USB ports, slots, and buttons around its perimeter. You can transfer your files to and from your PC or to an external hard drive. It's got cameras, too!

You can read more here.

If you don't use an Android phone, there will be a small learning curve. This video features the Motorola Xoom, and it's pretty much exactly how the Transformer's Honeycomb system works.

With the docking keyboard, the battery life is supposed to run 16 hours. I've yet to achieve that, but am doing some trouble shooting to figure out why. Still, I'm getting a decent 8+ hours.

It comes loaded with Polaris, a word processing program. To write efficiently you need to lock the keyboard, which is the button directly above the pound sign. Surprisingly, locking the keyboard does not affect the keyboard for other uses; it just makes it easier to use the word processing program. I keep mine locked all the time.

The price of the tablet itself is $399. The docking keyboard is $150. Altogether the price for both is the same as the Apple Ipad without a keyboard.

I went looking for an Ipad, but found out that all the college kids that work at Best Buy use the Asus Transformer.

I completely understand why!