The choice between tablet and laptop really is the Devil’s bargain. On one hand, you can stick with a laptop. With it, you have creative power, computing muscle and roomy comfort, as well as the heft and dead keyboard space when you’re not busy making things. On the other hand, you could go with a slate, have a wonderful media experience, only to throw it across the room when you have to write anything longer than a status update.
Asus knows the kind of balancing act you have to do when considering which device to bring, and they have offered a solution. Just yesterday, they launched the Asus Transformer Book T100. The device is, loosely, a hybrid, able to change from laptop to tablet with a simple click. Just snap the screen onto the included keyboard dock, and hey, presto! It’s a laptop. When we say laptop, we do mean it. The T100 runs the full version of Windows 8.1, allowing you to do basically everything you could do on your work or home device, without the hassle of carrying around a massive rig. It even comes bundled with the full Microsoft office suite, so you can stay productive anywhere you can park yourself.
The T100 runs the Atom Z3740 “Bay Trail” processor that delivers stellar performance and even more impressive battery life. Both Intel reps and Asus folks promised that this device can deliver 11 hours of use. To clarify, that’s 11 hours of constant browsing over Wi-Fi, so it’s real, usable power they mean.
It comes in at a very svelte 10.5mm in tablet mode, with a very roomy 10.1-inch display, all the usual wireless standards such as Bluetooth 4.0 and Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, as well as expandability via a microSD slot.
Under the hood, the T100 packs a 1.33GHz quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, and wither 32 or 64GB of storage. The tablet alone tips the scales at 550g while the dock comes in at 520g for a grand total of just about 1kg combined. The device is available now, for just PHP23,995, which, all things considered, is a steal.