I still don’t own a tablet. I like the concept of having a light computing device that I can carry around, that’s large enough to let me read books and surf the web at ease, but a touchscreen is limiting and lacks some of the standard functionality of a laptop. So in the end, you just have another mobile device to lug around.
For example, try writing an article on a touchscreen. Using a virtual keyboard is often uncomfortable and handwriting recognition software becomes ridiculous if you’re jotting down more than a few words. So how can you get the functionality of its least a netbook out of a tablet without the use of a keyboard? Well, the answer is simple: Add a keyboard. Certainly, you can buy keyboard docks for many tablets on the market and some even come with battery packs that can recharge the tablet. But that can add another couple of hundred dollars to your purchase. And it’s just another periphery to carry with you. So Asus has gone one step farther with their Eee Pad Slider SL101, and built in a keyboard.
Working on the same logic as a slider smartphone, the Asus Slider has a keyboard underneath the screen which pops out and locks into place – essentially converting it into a laptop. And with the dimensions 273 x 180.3 x 17.3 mm, it allows for a full QWERTY keyboard. The Slider comes with Polaris Office pre-installed which isn’t as versatile as Microsoft Office, but gives you the basic functionality of a word-processing suite. But Honeycomb (Android 3.2) doesn’t provide all the keyboard shortcuts you’d expect. Copy and paste work but others ones, such as find and select all don’t.
When it comes to typing, the keyboard is a little small even by netbook standards. When I placed my larger-than-average hands next to each other on the home row, I didn’t have much room to move them around. But thankfully, I still hunt and peck as I never took any typing classes. And for hunting and pecking, the keyboard works quite well. Its responsiveness is on par with most netbook keyboards. Arguably, typing on the Slider’s virtual keyboard takes slightly less time to register on the screen. But the physical keyboard is only slow if you have too many applications running at once in the Honeybomb (Android 3.2) OS.
In fact, the only real problem is that it doesn’t have a touchpad. Trying to use a touchscreen in tandem with a physical keyboard is somewhat confusing because your hand is often bouncing between the keyboard and the “monitor.” You can plus in a mouse via the USB port, but Android doesn’t seem to be designed with mouses in mind. For example, highlighting content is a little clumsy. Normally, you tap the screen to highlight and and a bar appears on the screen which you pull down into a box to grab the text you want. It’s awkward but presumably it’s set up like that so you don’t accidentally highlight content while you’re trying to click on menus or switch between screens. But unfortunately highlighting text with a mouse works exactly the same way. You now have a cursor you can move to where you want, but once you click on the text, the bar appears and you have to drag it down.
But this is a software issue not a hardware one, so, theoretically, this could be fixed with an update to Honeycomb, or perhaps by converting to Ice Cream Sandwich (the next-gen Android OS which merges its tablet and smartphone OSes) when it comes out.
Honeycomb still has less apps available than on the iPad or even in Gingerbread. But at least for site-based apps, you can circumvent this by downloading the Opera Mobile browser. It’s a little slower than the Chrome and Firefox apps, but you can change the user agent to desktop which forces all websites to load their full versions and not their crappy mobile ones. This, of course, is something an iPad can’t do, due to the prevalence of Flash on the Internet, and why those site-based apps were designed in the first place.
As a media device, the Slider is impressive. Powered by the NVIDIA Tegra 2.10 GHz dual-core CPU, the Asus tablet has 1GB of RAM and MicroSD reader, making it a fast computing device, ideal for multitasking. And the 10.1-inch LED Backlight WXGA screen with a resolution of 1280×800 makes it a great device to watch HD videos in both Flash and Quicktime formats. And there’s a mini HDMI port so you can hook it up to an HDTV.
Asus claims the battery lasts eight hours, but when Wi-Fi is active and the screen is on full brightness, the charge lasts closer to 5.5 hours. Still, that’s much better than most laptops and is certainly useful if you wish to use it as an e-reader by employing either the Kindle or Kobo app for Android. Granted with two cameras (5 MP and 1.2 MP) and the keyboard, the Slider weighs 960 g, making it slightly heavier than other tablets. And so holding it up to read can get tiring after awhile.
But that’s a minor complaint. And while, ultimately, the Asus Slider may not fully measure up to a netbook, it’s still an impressive, little machine. And it’s certainly moved to the top of my own shopping list.
The 16GB model is available for $479 while the 32GB model is available for $579. For more information, check out Asus’ website.
