Gadgetory

hi I'm rich Brown frissina today we're gonna take a look at the Asus Transformer all-in-one this is a really unique new system from Asus it's gonna be available in April for $12.99 and it's probably one of the more involved desktops we've ever reviewed here in its standard configuration which you see here it's a pretty simple system it's Windows 8 you have a wireless mouse and keyboard it's an 18 point 400 screen with a 19 by 10 resolution there's a core i5 chip inside it a terabyte hard drive a King's of memory as well as the more or less expected ports from USB 3 analog audio out SD card etc etc so while 18.4 inches is definitely small for a standard all-in-one in this price range what you also get with this system is an Android tablet I can push a button aside and swap over to the androids 4.1 jellybean OS you can see here then the screen comes off and I have a pretty gigantic tablet to take around the house and the reason that works is because there's an NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip inside this display which lets the system function by itself so we've seen a couple other systems like this there's the system from Lenovo coming out later this year and Sony already put one out during the launch of Windows 8 last year so like that Sony the idea with this Asus system is that you're not really gonna take this tablet out on the train or really in anywhere where it's gonna be a true mobile device it's mostly for taking this screen around and using it someplace where you wouldn't want to use a traditional desktop say plunking it down in the kids bedroom for a little while you get on the couch to browse a newspaper now even more interesting with this system it also has a remote desktop feature so we can either hit this mode switch icon or hit this button on the side and the system will automatically go back into Windows 8 via remote desktop mode so the tablet connects back to Windows 8 via Wi-Fi in order for that to work both the base station and the tablet have to be on the same wireless network and you're probably best off if you use a 5 gigahertz network as opposed to a 2.4 gig which is more common tends to have a lot of traffic on it even further extending the utility of the system it also has an HDMI output so that means you can connect the standard PC monitor to the base unit use that as a standard desktop and then pop off the display here and use that as an Android tablet or even a remote in and have to users on the same Windows 8 system via separate monitors the benefits of Android on the tablet are that you get a clean interface a giant app library compared to what you'll find in Windows 8 right now as well as a pretty good touch input experience it's also interesting to have the tablet and the base station sort of work as two separate computers so if you want but it overall the concept seems like it would be a little smoother if it just ran Windows eight throughout granted then you wouldn't have the multi user experience but there'd be a lot less fiddling and back and forth between the different OSS and it probably generally an easier concept with people to understand it's also worth pointing out that the tablet is heavy it's not as heavy as the Sony Vaio tab 20 actually which came in just under 12 pounds this is about 5.6 pounds so for battery life we found that the tablet has just under five hours of use if you want to use it for watching movies and in Windows 8 remote desktop mode it comes in at about three and a half hours so there's definitely a drop-off there so ultimately of course the question is who should buy this thing and right now it's kind of hard to say we're gonna have Intel coming out with the next generation of CPUs in the next six months or so they promise better performance better battery life and hopefully smaller more lightweight versions of systems like this other vendors are also working on PCs with similar design and that it's an all-in-one and a tablet there's various iterations of how you can do that of course but I think by the end of this year we will see a whole fleet of PCs like this and we'll kind of have a better idea of what we want what we expect and what a good price is so all that said I can recommend the system if you like give you have a big tablet and you want sort of an extendable desktop and you like Android the mainstream consumer though the system is probably a bit too expensive to recommend particularly with so many other pcs like it coming out of the next few months so I'm rich Brown this is the Asus Transformer all-in-one