ASUS Transformer Tablet

[alma]

I have one of the small logitech ones and it works okay but have moved to using a Logitech M705 off of one of their proprietary dongles. It sounds like USB ports are at a premium but it is so much nicer to use. I have a wireless keyboard on the same dongle.

[Graham Smith]

I have a wireless mouse that uses a dongle but USB ports are at a premium on a tablet and I'd rather have a Bluetooth mouse than a USB mouse and perhaps a hub or USB squid as well. Of course, if I'm using the Targus dock I have then it doesn't matter - I'm using a wired mouse with that now.

The goal here is to see if this will work as a true hybrid in 4 or 5 configurations. Tablet alone; tablet with keyboard/trackpad; tablet, keyboard, and mouse, docked tablet with mouse, full size keyboard, monitor, and network connection.

[Graham Smith]

Update... I haven't had as much time to really get into what this thing can and cannot do but in a nutshell I find that it works better as a PC than I might have expected. The screen is a bit small as is the keyboard, but it's easy enough to plug in larger versions for serious work.

The memory and processor are a bit limited and I'm not 100% certain how Windows vs Tablet applications make use of the memory. There is 64gb built in and you can add a second 64gb SD but that's storage space as opposed to the RAM where Windows programs run. I should probably dig into this more but at this point I'm more concerned with seeing how it does.

I've installed a couple programs I use and they seem to run just fine as does Office 2013 that comes with it. The fact that this is included in the price is a plus when compared to some other Windows tablets that either have a trial version or some kind of cloud software. One thing I have yet to attempt is to load EzWinScore on it.

Where I'm running into some issues is with in trying to use this as a Tablet. The Windows apps aren't that easy to use without a keyboard and mouse and the tablet apps aren't very interesting - at least, not much of anything I have tried. The tablet comes with a lot of stuff that's just of no interest to me and right now that seems to just be cluttering things up for me. Adding and removing tiles from the start screen are easy enough with a mouse but not quite so easy without. Of course that may just be because I prefer a mouse.

[wgnoyes]

It's not windows RT, is it? If not, then ezws should install and run fine. Just do the same things that you would do to install on 7 or vista. That is, install and run as admin, and let it install into c:\uspsa instead of c:\program files\.

[Graham Smith]

The Transformer is the full version of Win8.1. But some programs are reported to not work well on tablet computers. The question I had is whether or not it would actually run correctly. The program uses an old version of SQL Anywhere and ODBC and the drivers may or may not be compatible.

I got a chance yesterday to test it and it does seem to work. Still some experimenting to do but it does seem to be possible.

[wgnoyes]

I have it running on Win7, and Chris Wren has it running on a 64bit version, so it's still good to go. Windows keeps both 64bit and 32bit versions of ODBC.

[Graham Smith]

Win7 isn't a problem but MS did a lot of work in Win8 regarding drivers. And since this program uses a fairly old ODBC driver, I wasn't sure what to expect. As I said, it did install and seems to be working OK. As might be expected, the version of Win8.1 on the T100 is the 32bit version, so there's no issue about the 32 vs 64 bit versions of the ODBC Administrator.

[wgnoyes]

yeah, I think we would have all already heard about it if ezws didn't run on Win8.

[Graham Smith]

I'm still sorting out the differences between a full version of Win8.1 on a desktop and a hybrid such as the ASUS. So far there are fewer than I would have suspected.

One annoying problem is the "Battle of the Cloud Drives". The ASUS transformer comes with both MS SkyDrive and the ASUS WebStorage and I already use DropBox. Of course, the MS software is hooked to SkyDrive and, so far at least, I haven't found anything linked to the ASUS cloud but I haven't pushed all the buttons yet.

And, for a gesture enabled tablet, Internet Explorer isn't very well designed. I may have to skip it and install Firefox instead.

[Graham Smith]

Here is a a more or less final post on this. All in all, for the price, this is a decent little Netbook. That said, I am completely underwhelmed by Win 8.x and it's attempt at being both a tablet and a PC. I think that the engineering team got more things wrong than they got right. While version 8.1 has fixed a lot of the technical problems, the user interface still suffers. One good thing is the ability to use a mouse with the tablet interface - that offers some real advantages sometimes.

As far as usefulness, this little machine is proving to be a valuable addition to match management. We still use EZWS in combination with PractiScore and this gives us a very good platform to work from. I have not had the inclination to attempt to install BlueStacks on it yet to see if I can get PractiScore going, but may give it a try.