Tablet or Netbook: You Decide

Successor to the Asus Transformer Prime, the Asus Transformer Pad TF300 is much cheaper and fixes many of the problems that appeared in the Prime. Although the screen my not be as bright and the battery life won’t last as long as the Prime, the $100 difference in the prices is something to consider. Just yesterday, the TF300 released in US retailing at $379 for the 16 GB version and $399 for the 32 GB version. If you want the keyboard dock, which is the main feature of this tablet, it will cost you another $149 to a grand total of about $530-550! This may seem very expensive and nearly matches the price of Apple’s iPad, but with the dock you can use the TF300 as both a tablet and netbook.

As seen in the chart above, the TF300 rivals the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 and the Acer Iconia Tab A200. Overall the TF300 beats both of the other tablets in preformance and graphics. Not only that, the battery life is quite outstanding as well. On average you would get about a 10 hour battery life with the tablet alone, but if you had the dock as well, an extra 5 hours of charge would extend your battery life for longer usage. This is what Asus advertises but if you look at the chart below, you can see that it gets about 8hr 30min tablet alone and 12h with the dock, only extending battery life by about 3hr 30min. In comparison to other tablet devices, the TF300 is able to pull off a much longer battery life with the dock but averages without it. As you can see from comparing the TF300 and the Prime, it loses in the long run, for both the tablet itself and with dock extension.

Leading into the specs, the TF300 runs on a NVIDIA Tegra 3 T30L Quad-Core @1.2Ghz CPU, a GeForce 12-core GPU and also has 1 GB of RAM. The display is a 10.1″ LED Backlight IPS panel with a 1280 × 800 resolution which allows 10 finger multi-touch and has a brightness of 350 nits. On the outside of the tablet you will find a 2-in-1 Audio Jack, a micro HDMI  port, and a microSD card reader. There is also a mic as well as a 3D stereo built-in and a 8MP Auto focus back camera with a 1.2MP front camera on the TF300. Asus offers a free lifetime 8GB web storage with a purchase of this tablet on top of the 16GB/32GB built in storage on the TF300. Like most Android devices nowadays, it will be running on Ice Cream Sandwich. Moving on to the tablet’s dock, it is a  full QWERTY US keyboard with your standard trackpad. The dock also has a USB port and SD card slot on the right hand side and a charging LED on the left.

If you’re wondering what colours suit you, the TF300 comes in three different colours, Royal Blue, Iceberg White, and Torch Red. Considering portability, the tablet and dock are quite thin and light. The pad is 263 × 180.8 × 9.9mm and weighs 635g, while the dock is 263 ×180.8 × 10.2 mm while weighing 546g. The dimensions are quite similar so it will be like holding two tablets, except it will be much lighter than carrying around a netbook with you. It’s a real tradeoff without the dock, but it’s not necessary to buy it because it’s just an addon. If you hate typing on a screen and want some extra battery life, you might as well get the dock.