Asus Joins High Density Display Club With New Transformer Tablet

crookedvulture writes "The new iPad has received a lot of attention for its high-density display, but it's not the only tablet with extra pixels. Enter Asus' Transformer Prime Infinity, which has a 10.1" screen with a 1920x1200 resolution. The display doesn't look as good as the iPad's Retina panel, which has crisper text and better color reproduction. However, the Android-based Transformer has perks the iPad lacks, like an ultra-bright backlight, a Micro HDMI port, a microSD slot, and more internal storage. The Infinity is also compatible with an optional keyboard dock that adds six hours of battery life, a touchpad, a full-sized SD slot, and a standard USB port. The Transformer's tablet component is definitely no iPad-killer. When combined with the dock, though, the resulting hybrid offers a much more flexible computing platform."

Re:Why do they act like a keyboar dock is a big de

[0123456]

You can use any Bluetooth keyboard with the iPad and battery docks are a dime a dozen....

Because the keyboard dock turns it into an Android netbook, rather than a kludgy collection of knocked-together addons where you have to support the display with your knees?

WUXGA finally (again) !

[spongman]

finally the 16:9 fad is over. maybe soon i'll be able to replace my 15" WUXGA D830...

Re:battery dock???

[Hardhead_7]

As an owner, in my experience the nice thing about the battery dock is that you don't *have* to be near an outlet. All the internals of the tablet are in the tablet itself, so the keyboard/battery dock is just that. A keyboard with a big battery. So you can juice it up overnight and drop it into your bag when you leave the next morning. For someone like me, a field engineer, that's a godsend. I never know when I'll be near an outlet. Now, admittedly, I may be a special case. But it's definitely nice for someone who's on the move quite a bit.

Re:Why do they act like a keyboar dock is a big de

[0123456]

So pairing a Bluetooth keyboard and a using a stand makes it a "kludge"?

Uh, yes. Is this supposed to be a trick question?

Re:battery dock???

[aus_jackd]

I agree with you. I absolutely love my Transformer Prime for the fact that I can charge it overnight and use it all day without having to recharge.

I spend perhaps 3-4 days a week in my car, visiting clients and attending trade shows etc. I never have to worry about the charge on my Prime. Does email, Citrix client, word processing, spreadsheets etc.

I also recently flew to China. On a budget airline that had no personal entertainment options, for over 10 hours. I watched several hours of TV shows during the flight. When I landed I still had more than 50% battery remaining. I stayed in several hotels with no Wifi. They had free internet over Ethernet only. A $6 USB-Ethernet adapter later and I was away. Moreover I was able to load photos from my camera directly onto the tablet through the full sized SD card slot and show them to clients/friends/family on the larger tablet screen.

At night I just left the keyboard dock in my luggage and just carried the tablet around. Visited a cafe or a bar, read a novel, surf on free WiFi. No recharging needed because during the day I had depleted the keyboard battery and not the tablet battery.

There are many reasons one would choose this form factor. I love it.

Re:Why do they act like a keyboar dock is a big de

[EdIII]

I thought we were comparing tablets, or netbooks/ultrabooks with a touch screen interface.

While interesting, what you linked to does not seem to have a touchscreen interface listed in the specs. HP only seems to offer a single touchscreen product [hp.com] for almost 3 times as much when you search their site.

I'm particularly interested in the touchscreen for some mobile employee use cases that we have. The Latitude XT tablet is the cheapest that I can find starting at $750. Without the dock, this new Transformer Prime is $499, considerably less than $750. That's an Android OS, but I have been looking into HTML5 to capture touch screen input.

Re:Why do they act like a keyboar dock is a big de

[kidgenius]

"It's an actual accessory designed specifically for this particular tablet, not some 3rd party attachment designed to try and fill a void. "

Right because an accessory designed for the iPad is not designed specifically for the iPad....

It's actually the other way around really. The tablet is designed for the accessory, whereas an ipad is not. So the accessory then works quite a bit better with the tablet because the tablet was designed to use it.

Re:" high density club" not really

[wonkey_monkey]

Great! So on an iPad all HD video has to be scaled up to a different resolution resulting in a loss of perceivable sharpness, whereas on this Asus it can be displayed at a perfect 1:1 pixel correspondence.

I know which I'd prefer.