After months of waiting, local tablet aficionados can finally get their hands on ASUS’ Honeycomb powered tablet, the Eee Pad Transformer.
The Eee Pad Transformer was officially launched yesterday at the Palladium Club in the New World Hotel in Makati. Aside from the Transformer, ASUS also unveiled the colorful K3 line of notebooks, and their newest brand ambassadors. The Eee Pad Transformer has quickly amassed plenty of positive reviews from foreign press, and after we spent a couple of minutes with it we came away impressed and wanting more.
The ASUS Eee Pad Transformer gets its moniker from being able to transform from a tablet to something akin to a netbook. The Transformer is powered by Google’s Honeycomb tablet OS and NVIDIA’s dual core Tegra 2 processor. The 10.1-inch IPS panel is nice and bright, and has excellent viewing angles.
The device felt quick, snappy and was a joy to use. There wasn’t an active internet connection during the time of the event so we really weren’t able to check out the amount of apps or how fast the browser was, but we did manage to play a few downloaded games on the unit that required a lot of processing power and came away impressed. It’s safe to say that this little device will be able to handle whatever you can throw at it.
The keyboard deserves a bit of attention too. We really wouldn’t blame you if you thought that the Transformer was just another netbook with it attached. Aside from giving you a better place to type on (a physical keyboard will always trump a virtual one), the Transformer’s keyboard pulls double duty as a battery pack, extending the Transformer’s 9 hour battery life (according to ASUS) to 16.
Unfortunately the only way you can connect to the internet is via Wi-Fi, as there’s currently no 3G infused model available as of yet.
The Eee Pad Transformer will be coming your way sometime in June, and will have a tag price of 22,990 (32GB) for the keyboard-less version, and 29,990 (32GB) with the keyboard. Watch out for our full review that we’ll post up as soon as we get our demo unit. Until then, you can watch the video of our hands-on below.