Asus Transformer Pad (TF300T) review

Broadly speaking, the Transformer Pad looks like... well, it looks like a tablet. Since a tablet is basically all screen and bezel, it's hard for any device to look notably different from any other. The Transformer Pad does have a nice-looking back, to be fair: its tree trunk-like ringed pattern reflects light really nicely, and looks and feels a lot better than the slippery back on most other plastic tablets. It's not the metallic beauty the Prime is, but it's quite well made, very solid and sturdy. The tablet is available in Royal Blue, Iceberg White, and Torch Red — mine was Royal Blue.

Despite the lesser materials, the Transformer Pad is both thicker and heavier than the Transformer Prime, though not by much — 1.39 pounds to the Prime's 1.29, and 9.9mm (0.39 inches) thick rather than 7.9mm (.31inches). It's still slimmer and lighter than the original Transformer, though, and I didn't notice it feeling any bigger than most other tablets I've tested.

On every surface but the back, the Transformer Pad is pretty nondescript. As you hold the tablet horizontally, there's an Asus logo above the top left corner of the display, with a proximity sensor and camera lens centered above the screen. The only other blemish on the front — I call it a blemish because I tried to wipe it off a few times — is a downward-pointing arrow that indicates where you line the tablet up to insert it into the keyboard dock (more on that in a minute).

I almost always complain about one port location or another, so it's nice to know someone out there does it right — everything on the Transformer Pad feels like it's in exactly the right place. The single-button volume control is at the top of the left edge, just above the micro HDMI port and micro SD card slot; the power button is right around the corner, on the top. That means you won't mix up the two buttons and crank up the volume when you're trying to turn the tablet off, a problem I have all too often. The headphone jack is on the right side, where it will almost never be in the way as you hold the tablet horizontally (though it could get in the way in portrait mode). The dock connector, obviously, is on the bottom.

The only thing that's poorly placed is the single speaker. It's located on the back — itself a bad decision, since sound is directed away from you — and it's placed exactly where the fingers on your right hand will naturally gravitate as you hold the Transformer Pad sideways. The speaker is loud enough to blast through your fingers, and actually outputs pretty good, clear sound, but it gets awfully quiet — it's kind of fun to mess with the sound by moving your hand around, but if you want to actually listen to something you'll have to move your hand to some awkward spot to keep the speaker free.

If you've read our tablet reviews before — hell, if you've used a tablet before — you know what to expect from a tablet camera. That's why I'm happy to report that the Transformer Pad actually over-delivers in this area, at least slightly. Its 8-megapixel rear camera has a nicely bright f/2.2 aperture, and does better in low light than a lot of other tablets; it's still not nearly in the class of even a low-end point-and-shoot. In good lighting photos are pleasingly sharp — many tablets produce pictures that are so soft they appear out of focus, but the Transformer Pad does a nice job of locking on. Quality is still nothing to write home about, and there's some noise even in the best of conditions, but it's better than I anticipated. The 1.2-megapixel front camera takes decent shots as well, for what it is: it's brighter than many other tablets, but it's still nothing special.

The Transformer Pad also shoots 1080p video, but I'm not particularly impressed. Footage comes out really soft, and dynamic range is so poor that even slight differences in lighting get blown out in the shot. That's all fairly normal for a tablet camera, but given the improvements Asus made I expected a little better.

The camera app is easily among the best I've used on an Android device. It's incredibly simple, with all the necessary controls clustered by the shutter release, so you can do everything with only your right thumb while using your other hand just to steady the tablet. You get some manual control, though in fairness you can only do so much to improve mediocre photos. The app's a little slow, though: it takes longer than expected to load or to switch between modes, and refreshes slowly enough that if you move the tablet around you'll notice the viewfinder lagging considerably. Autofocus also takes a half-second to lock, but the shutter lag is pretty minimal once it's focused.

The Transformer Prime was one of the first devices to be upgraded to Android 4.0, and we noticed a considerable difference from Honeycomb: the Transformer Prime immediately became faster and more stable, and the core apps gained a new level of polish. From Gmail to Chrome (which isn't a core app, but is absolutely the first one you should download), Android feels more tablet-optimized than ever.

The Transformer Pad comes with Android 4.0 from the get-go, and as we've seen over and over since the Prime's upgrade, Ice Cream Sandwich is just a really solid tablet operating system. There's far less lag as you move around home screens or open and close apps on the Transformer Pad — it's not a completely fluid experience yet, but it's leaps and bounds beyond Honeycomb's capabilities.

Asus doesn't change much, either, opting to leave Ice Cream Sandwich as vanilla as possible. Well, let's call it French Vanilla: the company did redesign the three persistent system buttons and the quick settings menu, but those are fairly minor and cosmetic. There's a setting added so you can take a screenshot by holding the multitasking button, which is handy. Otherwise, the user experience isn't changed at all, so you're getting Ice Cream Sandwich. Which is just like Honeycomb, really, except it works well.

The apps situation is another story. Android 4.0 revamps some of the core apps on the device, and makes them work quite well on the larger screen — like Gmail, which is now an experience completely unrivaled by anything on iOS. Asus adds some non-stock apps to the equation as well, like the Polaris Office suite, the MyNet DLNA app, and a web storage app shockingly called WebStorage. Most will likely sit unopened, but one is quite cool: SuperNote is a nifty note-taking app that lets you combine text, drawings, photos, and more into a single notebook. You can annotate pictures and create scrapbooks, and then export them via email or to the Gallery app.

Beyond SuperNote and a few others, the third-party app situation on Android tablets is still pretty dire. I love apps like Rdio, Spotify, Simplenote, the New York Times, Flipboard, and Facebook, and those apps simply don't have good tablet equivalents for Android. All too often, you'll end up using phone-optimized apps that are both ugly and difficult to use on a screen this large.

There is a small silver lining for the Transformer Pad, though, thanks to its Tegra 3 processor. A number of games have been tweaked to take advantage of the processor, and when you get a Tegra-friendly game it's pretty remarkable how well it plays. I played the Tegra-optimized Shadowgun as well as the standard Android version of the same game, and though both worked well, the game was more fluid, more detailed, and generally smoother when it had been optimized for Nvidia's chip. There aren't a ton of these games out there, and they tend to be graphics-intensive first-person shooters, but when you come across one it's a really nice improvement.

The Transformer Pad's version of the Tegra 3 is clocked slightly lower than the Transformer Prime (1.2GHz rather than 1.4), but I can't say I noticed the difference. It plays games incredibly smoothly, and was more responsive to touches and swipes in Temple Run than some of the other tablets I've tested. It had no problem running a dozen or more apps at once, and pinching and zooming worked really well. Streaming or playing 1080p video went without a hitch, and the Skyfall and Gatsby trailers both look great on the 10.1-inch screen. There are still a few stutters and lags, especially as you open and close apps, but years of testing and dozens of tablets have taught me that's an Android problem rather than an issue with any one device.

I'm increasingly convinced that the Android browser just isn't very good, and a tablet's processor doesn't really make a difference. The Transformer Pad doesn't seem to load pages any faster than any other tablet, and does the same odd hang-at-80-percent thing as most of its competitors. The Transformer Pad does scroll a little more fluidly and it zooms smoothly, but it's not a noticeably better experience. Chrome is a little better, but again, it's better on every device — it seems like Android browser performance only gets but so good.

Our benchmarks tell basically the same story. None of the scores we saw were mind-blowing, but all were above the level required for a device to run well and most scores were near the top of the tablet spectrum anyway.

The Transformer Pad's transformational abilities wouldn't be particularly interesting in a Michael Bay movie, but its conversion from tablet to laptop is a nice trick. It happens via an optional $149 dock, which connects to the Transformer Pad via the dock connector, and two other slots on the bottom of the tablet — it's a lot easier to dock than the original Transformer, which always felt like it was going to break when you snapped it into the dock.

Once they click into place, the two pieces hold together tightly and actually start to work like a laptop. You're basically using an Android 4.0 netbook, for better and for worse. The dock adds a full USB port and SD card slot to the device, but the keys are kind of cramped and a little mushy. There are a lot of function keys for navigating around the tablet — you can control the volume, switch apps, search, and even tweak some settings all from the keyboard. One thing you can't do, at least by default? Turn the Transformer Pad on — that requires a press on the tablet itself, which is a little frustrating. You can change this in settings, and you should. The trackpad is smooth and useful: two-fingered scrolling works smoothly through web pages and moving around in apps is easy, though Android is clearly more designed for touch than for mousing around.

I wouldn't call the Transformer Pad + dock combination a laptop replacement, but it's a great thing to have for travel or for working in a tight space. The dock weighs 1.2 pounds and adds some definite girth to the setup, but it's still lighter and more portable than just about any laptop. My hunch is that Windows 8 is going to be a better operating system for this kind of convertible device than Android is, but it's still a great option to have for an Android tablet.

One oddity: the Transformer Pad's keyboard dock isn't compatible with any of Asus' other tablets. In fact, none of the docks are cross-compatible, so if you're going to get a couple of tablets you're also going to need a couple of docks.