Tablet… Laptop… Tabtop?

Well I bought a tablet… but not any tablet, the ASUS TF300 Transformer Pad. I’ve wondered for a while why people liked little useless laptops, netbooks if you will, and now I understand the draw. I’ve been walking around all day with the TF300 and it’s nice to hold, light and not too small to use. But more than that, rather than the shitty netbooks that are underpowered for windows or run linux with next to no support for any useful programs it comes preloaded with a load of pretty useful software that interfaces with Microsoft Office files.

So as a laptop it’s pretty good, fully featured, resonably powerful and with a 15 hour battery life you don’t need to carry around charging cables which is a big plus. That’s all well and good, but what’s next is better, it’s a tablet built by ASUS, running android from Google, so it has access to everything Google are throwing into their Nexus 7 available straight after a software upgrade as soon as you connect to the internet. In fact the only thing its missing the 15 quid free credit on the play store, which if you know all you need to do is log into the play store with your Google account on a Nexus 7 to get it, isn’t a big deal so long as you’re planning on walking past an electronics store in the near future.

As a tablet it feels nice, it’s a little heavy but not so much that you can’t hold it and use it, just so that you’ll know you’ve put it down when you do. It’s plastic case doesn’t feel flimsy or cheap, and an added bonus over the Transformer Prime’s metal case it doesn’t block the internal GPS. It does flex a little if you press try and make it flex behind the screen but its barely noticeable in normal use. The 10.1″ screen is a great size for watching videos even though it is only 1280×800, but unlike the Nexus 7 it also has a mini HDMI output.

I can see why some people would prefer the Nexus 7, being half the cost is no small part of that, but not taking cost into account the Nexus 7 with it’s smaller size it’s more portable and I’d suggest much better for reading books and magazines etc, however if you want a device to take on holiday or on the tube to read, why wouldn’t you buy a Kindle. With the paper display and much higher battery life I’d much prefer one over the Nexus 7 for reading, the only down side is it wont work without light as it has no backlighting.

All in all, I can completely understand why someone would buy the Nexus 7 over the TF300, but i’d say you will have made a mistake.