Gadgetory

hi i'm scott steam with CNET and holiday shopping season is upon us you're probably looking for that great budget pick some sort of super cheap laptop that can get everything done not cost too much it used to be called a netbook and then netbooks went away then there's the Chromebook and chromebox may not do everything you need now it looks like there are finally netbooks for the Windows 8 era in fact the Asus Transformer book t100 is a prime example of that this runs full Windows 8 has a very netbook like design and it can transform into a tablet with the press of a button right here this whole handy dandy concoction will cost about 379 you might even get it for less if you look at a Black Friday sale or two it's a really good deal and it approaches the rock-bottom prices that you used to see in netbooks all over the place now is it worth it well you know that's up to you how much do you want to spend I can tell you this it feels like a netbook which is both a good and a bad thing in the sense that it's very portable the battery life is super strong about 10 hours of battery life thanks to a new processor that's in here that's an atom bay trail processor that's a quad-core CPU and it is a step above the previous Atom processor providing mostly that battery life boost a little more performance boost and you know this thing actually outperformed a more expensive larger laptop that Toshiba had the Toshiba click that we reviewed recently so you know in its territory pretty good value but again this keyboard is cramped it's plastic you feeling it's not backlit and the trackpad is small not the greatest work environment in the world but it's there if you want to get your work done and there's a USB 3 port which is one of the new Bay Trail editions so so faster throughput there everything else you're gonna have little mic reports all over this tablet kind of standard tablet land there with your micro USB your micro HDMI a little slot there from memory storage headphone jack and a super plastic a huge finger magnet I mean fingerprint magnet you know this is not something you're gonna want to show off but it's functional in the home it's probably better in this laptop forum then has a tablet another nice plus this charges via micro USB so you even though it comes with a charger you can easily find another lying around and that's pretty much the story of this runs Windows 8.1 so you don't have to deal with Windows RT always a confusing landscape and if you have under four hundred dollars to spend and you're looking for a do-it-all a little portable it does a lot more than a Chromebook because it has a better much better offline storage and you have the full Windows support plus Microsoft Office student edition is pre-installed take a look for it it's a pretty good pic not a phenomenal product but we hope there are a lot more of these types of netbook plus devices that hit the market soon I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at the very budget-friendly Asus Transformer book t100