Asus confirmed on their Facebook page a few hours ago that their premium Android tablet will indeed be getting an update tomorrow. But I’m not sure that anyone really needed the confirmation; Asus had already tweeted the announcement from their official account. They even posted the graphic you see at right.
Still, I’m thrilled. It’s a pretty good tablet and it’s also a decent netbook. I was a little surprised at how well the keyboard dock was integrated into the tablet; this really isn’t a tablet. It’s much closer to being a netbook convertible.
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Exactly.
Before I got my Transformer I thought the keyboard dock was a just gimmick (and only got the Transformer / dock because I wanted the full USB ports in order to play around with Honeycomb USB APIs). Now… I find myself using my Transformer when I would have used my phone or my laptop or my desktop, with the core tablet use-cases (e.g. couch and bed surfing) on top of all that.
Why? It is just such an elegant hybrid that it is easy to default to. Switching between the netbook and tablet modes is almost seamless (except for the physical jiggling in and out of the dock). For that matter, you can switch your perspective on it in an instant – scrolling a page with your finger and then clicking and dragging with the touchpad. The touchscreen and the keyboard and the mouse “just work” together without my thinking about it.
In retrospect, this shouldn’t have been a surprise. ASUS broke open the netbook market and is still its undisputed champion. If anyone was going to figure out how to merge the tablet and the netbook it would be them. It is no wonder it is the most successful Honeycomb tablet to date.
Hi!
The Eee Pad Transformer just got another FW update (yeah, I finally got one, and I fully agree with Ravi), though it’s still 3.2 of course. I’m not about to start exploring for changes at this late hour, but one change is immediately and clearly visible, and that’s that with the Eee Pad docked, the mouse pointer has been replaced by a blue circle 1 cm in diameter.
I’m not too sure about that new feature. I suppose it’s to simulate the finger touching the screen, but I think I’d rather have the precision afforded by the mouse pointer. (Maybe there’s a way to disable the circle and revert to the mouse pointer; I don’t know, and I’m not testing now.)
LCNR
That update is a few days old, actually. I had that blue circle before I wrote the post.
So that’s where it came from; I could have sworn that there was a mouse pointer before.