Laptop Thoughts: The Asus Eee PC Transformer: This Thing Looks Killer!

I can't say much for Asus' marketing tag line on the Transformer - "My Multiple Life, I decide" sounds like a bad translation of bottle of Chinese bipolar disorder drug - but the device itself is shaping up to me quite impressive...at least on paper. It has all of the standard goodness that we've come to expect from a modern Android tablet - the NVIDIA Tegra 2 1 Ghz dual-core CPU, 1080p playback support, a nice 10.1 inch IPS display running 1280 x 800 resolution, 16 Gb or 32 GB of storage, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, a 5 megapixel rear camera and a 1.2 megapixel front camera, and the usual assortment of sensors (G-Sensor, Light, Gyroscope, E-Compass, GPS).

What's really interesting about the Transformer is the fact that it docks with a keyboard that takes the 9.5 hour battery run-time and boosts it to an impressive 16 hours. If those are real numbers, and not inflated marketing numbers, this tablet will be an amazing breakthrough for people who need a device with incredible endurance. The fact that it has two USB ports, and an SD card reader in the keyboard base station, make it all the more tempting.

The best hardware in the world though won't make up for a lack of tablet-friendly applications, and based on my experience so far with the Motorola XOOM, this is a significant problem. I can only hope that as more Android 3.0 tablets come to market, developers will take note and gear up their coding efforts.