ASUS’ unique tablet and PC hybrid, the ASUS EEE Pad Transformer, created a lot of interest when it was first announced. And now it is getting a lot of good reviews for its unique take on mobile computing.
The ASUS EEE Pad Transformer got a lot of interest when it was first announced. Here’s a product that bridges the gap between the internet tablet and a netbook. The EEE Pad Transformer sports two unique and separate parts, which are sold as a bundle or separately. The first part, which is the brains of the whole device, is the tablet part. It comes equipped with a Tegra 250 chip and runs on Android 3.0, or Honeycomb. People who have bought the Transformer tablet report great, zippy performance thanks to its processor chip. The screen is no slouch either, as it generates HD resolutions of 1280×800.
The second part of the Transformer combo is the keyboard. The tablet connects to the keyboard and what you get is the typical netbook configuration. The tablet firmly docks onto the keyboard, which also has a trackpad for real netbook-style navigation.
The general consensus among users is that the ASUS EEE Pad Transformer works perfectly for what it is designed for – light computing and as a cross between a tablet and netbook experience. The processor is zippy enough to do the most common tasks associated with a tablet or a netbook – general computing and light gaming. It also allows the users to experience having a tablet and then have the option to work more efficiently with the attached keyboard, because, really, typing on a screen can be quite hard.
Written by My Asus Eee on September 29th, 2011. 2 Comments »
Filed under Hardware.
Netbooks, particularly the Eee PC (duh), are great. You can take them everywhere, they’re relatively fast, and they’re good enough to allow you to finish your tasks without crashes. However, I’m not a big fan of their storage options. Either you get a really fast SSD that contains only around 32 GB of storage, or a hard drive that has 250 GB of storage, but only has 5400RPMs. Now if you’d like to have a hard drive with 320GB and 7200RPMs, check out this video posted by Netbook Reports.
What are the advantages of upgrading your hard drive other than the obvious storage gains, you ask? Netbook Reports answers that:
In addition to being faster over the stock hard drive, it also offers a 16MB cache to help load larger files faster, and also includes:
Low power consumption – With technologies like IntelliSeek, which calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption and SecurePark, which reduces power by parking the heads during low power idle mode, this drive delivers 5400 RPM-equivalent power consumption in a 7200 RPM drive.
Quiet – In a notebook drive, silence is golden. WD’s exclusive WhisperDrive combines state-of-the-art seeking algorithms to yield one of the quietest 2.5-inch hard drives on the market.
Reliable – ShockGuard technology protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks during shipping and handling and in daily operation.
What do you guys think? Is the tutorial sufficient enough or do you think there’s more info or facts you can share with us? Tell us about it by leaving a comment!
Recently, the trend is going towards solid-state storage. This means drives that have no moving parts. Most popular of these is flash memory. They’re cheap, durable, and can hold data even without power (unlike volatile RAM, which loses data when power is off). Since flash memory can allegedly reduce consumption caused by spinning hard drives, some manufacturers have switched to using solid state drives for their mobile computers. There are also flash-based hard drives meant for notebook computers that users can replace their existing drives with.
The Asus Eee MyPC sports a flash-based hard drive, instead of a conventional spinning one. One factor may be price (since a small flash drive is cheaper than a micro-sized hard drive with spinning parts). One may be power consumption.
The maximum power difference between a flash drive and a 2.5″ disk is 3 watts. If you average about 3 hours battery life, a flash drive would save at most 9 watt hours (wh). That’s 29 minutes with a 55 wh battery. Less than 20 if it isn’t seeking constantly – and less than 10 minutes if the drive spends half its time in standby mode.
The biggest power sink in my notebook is the “everything else” that stays on when nothing is happening – 13 watts. Next is the CPU when it is busy. Then the display if you keep it above minimum brightness, the DVD/CD player and finally, just above Wi-Fi, a busy disk.
Flash drives have a real advantage in shock resistance over disks. But the performance is about the same as a disk, the power savings minimal and the cost disadvantage huge. They make the most sense for premium ultra-light notebooks with low power CPUs and small screens as well as hand-held devices.
I guess I must add that speed is one of the advantages of flash-based storage over a disc-based one. Still, I’d like to get more juice out of my Eee’s battery.
Cloud hosting, currently only undertaken by a handful of servers, is rapidly becoming the main way in which many companies’ access data on the internet. The cloud, as it is generally referred to, consists of every internet account where data is stored, such as e-mails, accounts held with internet radio sites and online documents, to name but a few instances. A simple example would be a a programme such as Google documents. Once an account has been created, the stored document is accessible from any computer, without having to be stored on any one of them.
Bringing an Asus Eee PC around is really a huge convenience. Our favorite miniscule mini-laptop started this whole netbook thing. With the dawn of these affordable and slightly underpowered and undersized notebooks, everyone suddenly decided to take this whole portable computing thing seriously. I don’t think I’ve seen that many laptop or netbook toting people before, and that’s a good thing.
And that’s the keyword here. Portable. As much as we want to bring our computers with us everywhere we go, there’s a bit of a limitation with carrying our laptops around – how in blue blazes are going to print our documents when needed?
Of course we can upload our files to dropbox, our webmail accounts, or some other cloud storage solution, and go to the nearest internet café to have it printed. And we all know that internet cafés aren’t available everywhere. We may not even have an internet connection – wifi, 3g or otherwise – available to use for uploading our Word documents.
This is why some people opt to buying a portable printer so they can print almost anywhere they want. Of course, it means that they’ll have to bring extra stuff like the printer, paper, and, in some cases, inkjet cartridges. I doubt portable printer owners would bring laser printer toner cartridges around because that would be ridiculous – there are no portable laser printers just yet.
Of course, being portable, these printers would be subject to a few corners cut here and there to ensure that it’ll be light and compact enough to carry around anywhere. You’d lose some features like duplex printing, the clarity of printouts used with Brother printer toner cartidges, and of course I doubt you’d be able to use these gadgets for heavy-duty printing. However, if you need to have hard copies of your documents handy, it won’t hurt to carry one of these babies along with your Asus Eee PC.
Let’s say you want an Eee PC but you want to have bluetooth built-in. You’re not really into bluetooth dongles, and you want to hack your Eee. EeeUser member wacou has posted a guide to take the 1005HA apart safely.
Using any kind of laptop means you’ll have to take care of it to keep it in a good condition, and this often extends beyond wiping it with a rag every now and then – in order to maintain your netbook in an optimal condition, there are various procedures you could apply, say, every month, to get the best results
For example, a common problem with these devices is the accumulation of dust – what’s worse is that it can build up on the inside as well. It may not be noticeable in the beginning, but if you notice your netbook overheating a lot more commonly than it used to, maybe it’s time to undo those screws and clean the dust from around the fan.
Never take out the fan itself though – damaging it could cost you dearly as it’s sometimes difficult to replace. Don’t even think about doing something like oiling it – this will never end well. Just blow all the dust from around it and close the netbook. The more experienced among you may find it a good idea to replace the thermal paste on the heatsink every now and then, but unless you really know what you’re doing don’t go for that.
Also, consider how you’re using the netbook as well – if its fan hole is on the bottom, never lay it flat on a soft surface, like your bed. This would suffocate it and prevent it from cooling properly, degrading the quality of its cooling in the long run.
Since Eee PC 701s are already practically out of commission, the next best thing to do with these… classic netbooks would be to mod them into something else. Well, better than throwing them away, you can just mod your old Asus Eee PC 701 netbooks into a tablet computer. That’s right folks. The Eee PC 701 may have a minuscule screen, but apparently it works as a pretty decent tablet computer. And Windows XP looks pretty responsive as well.
Done by EeeUse Forum member mxjf, he shares his pretty awesome mod in this thread. According to mxjf:
The touchscreen is the $33 one from DX, and that IS electrical tape holding the thing together. I’m most likely going to sand/smooth the edges down and replace it with some black silicone sealant once I’m completely sure it’s good.
Check out the video below. the quality’s pretty bad, but you can see that Windows XP is pretty responsive and that the mod turned out pretty well:
Okay, I’m putting in a bit of a stretch here, but you can use your netbook battery to charge a lot of stuff. Heck, you can even charge your iPod and all.
We all know that netbooks have terrible audio. It’s something we’ve learned to live with because, well, we get what we pay for.
However, the coming of the iBoom is no surprise. I’m pretty sure that lots of Eee owners are asking for better audio fidelity from their miniscule units.
ASUS’ unique tablet and PC hybrid, the ASUS EEE Pad Transformer, created a lot of interest when it was first announced. And now it is getting a lot of good reviews for its unique take on mobile computing.
