Asus Eee Pad Transformer review

There were people who laughed when Apple launched the iPad. Firstly, the idea seemed ludicrous: the form factor hadn't existed previously and was not one in which anyone had shown any interest.

Secondly, the name was subject to much derision. Now, though, the market is aware of tablets and has accepted them in varying degrees, even when they have ludicrous names.

Well, no name we've seen yet is as bad as Asus' Eee Pad Transformer. But no product has caused as much excitement either. It's an Android Honeycomb tablet with dimensions similar to the iPad's, but with features that could make your laptop redundant.

The Eee Pad does this by offering a two-part solution. The main component is a tablet with a 10.1in screen and the usual features that come with the latest version of Android.

The second component - a keyboard with additional battery - costs around £90 extra but aims to allow the Eee Pad to compete with a PC. So does this system work, or will your compact laptop still triumph?

Laptop replacement
To dive straight in, we don't honestly think the Asus system can replace a Windows, Mac OS X or a Linux laptop. Honeycomb is a good mobile operating system, but there are several things about it that don't work as a serious computing platform.

Take, for example, copy and paste. This has never been the strong suit of most smartphones (although Nokia has never had a problem making this feature work). It took ages for Apple to introduce it and, while it does work on a phone, it's nowhere near as slick as on a desktop PC.

To use the Eee Pad like a laptop, you're going to need to copy and paste into and out of documents from time to time. This seems to involve transferring your hands from the keyboard onto the touchscreen. The way the docked tablet is angled makes this monstrously difficult and a very poor user experience.

Indeed, attaching the keyboard seemed to affect how we thought of the device. We have no problem using a tablet, but the addition of a dock with a decent keypad seemed to confuse us slightly, as if we were battling against the muscle memory of using a Windows laptop.

We found ourselves hardly using the touch screen, and tried to do everything with the mouse and keyboard. In the same way that Windows isn't designed for touch-screen displays, Android isn't really designed for keyboards and mouse inputs.

And then there's the keyboard shortcuts, which we're used to on all desktop operating systems. On Android, the likes of control+v don't work, and people who use PCs will find this frustrating. To be fair, these are early days for Honeycomb and future updates should improve all these concerns.

We also found that that the trackpad and arrow keys on the Transformer keyboard enticed us to do stupid things quite often. Several times we found our cursor jumping up the screen as we typed (because we leaned on the wrong bit of the keyboard). The good news is that you can switch off the trackpad. The bad news is that you can't turn of the arrow keys.

So far, you could be forgiven for thinking we don't much like the Asus. In fact, the truth is that we have loved every moment we've spent with it. The typing quirks are an irritation, but using the device as a laptop is still plausible.

SD card sockets on the tablet section and a full sized socket on the keyboard dock means that you can add storage, read and manipulate files from a digital camera (Adobe offers a mobile version of Photoshop for free on Android) as well as upload them to the internet.