Asus floated some big plans this year at the Consumer Electronics Show for merging categories of devices in a number of ways. Following in the Transformer Prime's footsteps is the tablet hybrid T700 Series, along with two 7-inch tablets and an elusive oddball of a gadget, the Padfone. We visited the company at CES to check out all these items.
T700 Series tablet hybrid
Asus's Transformer Prime has stirred the emotions of PC hybrid enthusiasts over the last couple of months, but Asus has no problem with making the tablet and keyboard dock look like old news. The 10.1-inch T700 series Android 4 model will have a Super IPS+ display at a 1920x1200 resolution, and a 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3 processor running Android 4—slightly faster than the Transformer Prime's 1.2GHz.
When we tried out the tablet, everything was ship-shape in terms of operation (except for the browser, as you can see by the half-loaded Ars page in the photos, but connectivity is generally in low supply at CES). The T700 is thin and light and has a great look to it. The on-screen keyboard worked well enough, but there’s some recourse for you if onscreen typing isn’t your thing.
The T700 docks in a keyboard dock ($149), like the Transformer Prime, with dedicated home and search keys next to the spacebar. The keyboard is quite small, and though an ASUS representative told us it was full size, it’s almost certainly 90 to 95 percent of a normal keyboard. The key wells were pretty shallow, but their feel is nice and clicky.
The T700 isn’t set to debut until the second quarter of this year, and will have a starting price $100 higher than the Transformer Prime at $599 for 32GB of storage, going up to $699 for 64GB, not including the dock (though the two pieces will be bundled in some countries).
7-inch tablets: Memo 171 and Memo 370T
Asus showed two 7-inch tablets at CES—sort of. The Memo 171 is a 7-inch form factor tablet that was announced a few months ago, with a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm 8260 processor and 1280x800 IPS+ display. It's a little thick for its size. And the design is a little revolting, with a reflective black plastic bezel and a faux-chrome strip bisecting the area below the screen that works as a slot for the tablet’s stylus. Why anyone would make these design choices for something human beings have to look at in order to use, we have no idea.
However, during use, the tablet operated quite well: apps opened quickly and it responded to swipes and taps consistently. The IPS screen was bright with good color saturation— though with the model Asus had set up, its reps didn’t know how to properly show it off (like Samsung did with their AMOLED devices at the show). Asus says the Memo 171 will get 8.5 hours of video playback from its 4400mAh battery, besting both the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet. Our only annoyance was the virtual keyboard: despite several tries with the same words over and over, the tablet failed to register to keys we intended to hit.
Asus also announced the Memo 370, but when we arrived at our meeting all Asus had to show was a mockup that was occupied by another outlet. We can say its design is much easier on the eyes, and Asus is promising a quad-core Tegra 3 processor running Android 4 for $249 with a rear camera, but no front-facing one. This tablet has some high standards to fulfill by the second quarter of this year.
The Padfone: a smartphone holder, and then some?
The Asus Padfone was announced well over a year ago, but a quad-core Tegra 3 version is now rumored to be in the works. We were allowed to handle a Padfone tablet and companion smartphone in our meeting with the company, though the device had to be off the entire time and we couldn’t get many details on the design.
The Padfone was thick and heavy for a tablet, with a door that opened in the back to reveal ports and a space to dock a smartphone. Asus reps said that the design will be refined a bit before the official launch at Mobile World Congress in February, but the weight and look need a pretty serious overhaul.
Asus has said little about how the Padfone will be able to interact with compatible smartphones, but at the very least, it shouldn’t need a smartphone to operate with its own Tegra 3 processor. Asus’s line for the product is that the Padfone allows you to access your phone on a bigger screen, but with the increasing availability of cloud services, users are going to be less and less in need of tablet and smartphone hardware that can interact with one another on only a content level.
Padfone pricing and release date are still unannounced, but Asus will firm up the hardware profile and details at Mobile World Congress, which begins February 27.
