Prometheus
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2008
- Messages
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Today, I have taken delivery of an Asus Eee Pad Transformer - a tablet computer running Android 3.0 (a.k.a. "Honeycomb"), which in some configurations (such as the one I purchased) is supplied with a hinged dock which transforms it into a 10"-sized laptop. I'm writing up my first impressions here, and intend to continue to write them over the course of the coming week, as I use the hardware and software more.
I went for this machine in particular, because I wanted something that was a bit more flexible than just a tablet (whilst still able to act as one on occasions where that's all I need), and as a means to take another step into switching over to ARM-based computers, since x86, most of the time, is overkill (and runs too hot) for the vast majority of my requirements.
My impressions of the hardware are good - it's very solid, and the laptop half has a good keyboard (it's of the "Scrabble-tile" variety, which I understand some folks don't get on well with, but I do fine with this type of keyboard, myself - I'm already almost up to my full typing speed after only a couple of hours with it). Both the tablet and keyboard halves have a nicely-textured surface, and feel quite "grippy", which I appreciate, as it makes it clear that plenty of thought went into this aspect of the design.
The keyboard half has two USB ports (both behind neat little doors of the very same sort that the Nintendo 3DS and DSi use to shield their SD Card slot), and a full-sized SD Card slot (to supplement the microSD slot on the tablet part of the unit), which comes with one of those neat little plastic "blanks" to keep dust out. When shutting the lid whilst docked, the screen goes off, just as it would on any other laptop.
The screen, a capactive one which apparently has very tough glass, is pretty responsive, although it's not as good for dragging items around (something which seems to be needed often on this device) as a resistive touch-screen is. This half of the device has a decent heft to it, but at the same time, it isn't too heavy - it feels substantial, and not at all flimsy, and it isn't ridiculously thin, which I was glad of.
All in all, this aspect of it is much, much better than the last Asus hardware that I used, which was the (in my view and experience, somewhat shonky) original EeePC 4G model. This feels like it will last, and even though the screen is meant for poking, prodding, and swiping with your fingers, this doesn't really seem to show much when you're using it in laptop form.
The software, however, has not made such a good first impression on me. If I had to describe Android in its current form in one word, it would be "unintuitive". From the very first moment with it, it has mostly been that.
When I first powered the unit on, I was greeted with a language select screen, bearing a drop-down list and a button with which to proceed, and nothing else. Trying to scroll down the list, by moving my finger down it, did nothing. It took several seconds before I clicked my mind into trying to move the list down by moving it upwards (which is a very counterintuitive way to move *down* a list), and this worked. Not a great start. It was responsive enough, at least, though. Unfortunately, this counterintuitiveness continued, and has not yet abated during my time with the machine so far. (As a side-note, according to some reviews, this scrolling weirdness also occurred when using the trackpad on the dock part, but this has been fixed on the retail units, and the trackpad behaves as it does on any other laptop.)
The next issue I encountered was that during the setup process, you cannot join a wireless network with a hidden SSID - you can only do this by skipping this step during setup, and trying to find the cryptically-hidden settings dialogue in order to join it once the initial setup is completed. Thankfully, once the option is found (and it's not intuitive to find it, since Android, or at least "Honeycomb", seems to rely quite a lot on expecting you to know exactly what obscure pictograms mean in order to navigate through it's interface), getting connected is very easy indeed.
It's bizarre how some parts of the interface - not surprisingly, the ones that don't stray from the established norms that almost all other systems, both desktop and portable, use - are quite simple and intuitive, but the ones that seem to have had effort put into "simplifying" them are not intuitive at all. It doesn't feel very cohesive to me, at all.
The next niggles I came across, I have yet to solve.
1: The desktop backgrounds that I prepared for the device, which are all sized at what is advertised as the native resolution for this machine (1280x800) are displayed massively zoomed-in, and the OS insists on me cropping them - which it then promptly ignores anyway, and simply crops to a spot vaguely close to what I actually set.
2: There is no option to stop the very annoying auto-suggest feature in the web browser, nor any way (when docked) of stopping the down and right arrows from hopping across all of the buttons present on a web-page if you happen to press down or right when on the last line of text you are writing in a text-entry box.
3: There seems to be no shortcut for hopping between tabs when using the keyboard.
4: If you accidentally press the back button (which is annoying mapped to the right-click on the keyboard dock), there doesn't seem to be any way of going forwards again - this caused the loss of the almost-completed original text of this review, and caused me to add this problem to the list during my re-write.
5: The icons in the Gmail app. They make no sense whatsoever, and there is no text to help clear up the mystery that they represent - I have never seen a worse interface (and I still remember how bad the early-2000s version of The GIMP was!). Why is an angry alien face the icon for "Mark as Spam"? I appreciate that this face is probably meant to resemble the Android mascot character, but even with this in mind, it doesn't make any sense either. Gmail's web interface is MUCH better than this, and I'm very disappointed to see that it hasn't been retained here.
6: Once I type a few words in a text-box, the cursor appears to be a space ahead of where it actually should be, making it look as though spaces have been typed which are not actually there.
7: The irritating message informing me about Automatic Google Sign-in taking place *every single time* I open a new tab in the web-browser. I cannot see a way of turning this off, short of turning off that whole feature, which I don't want to do.
8: When using the keyboard, standard shortcuts for certain operations (for example, Cut, and Paste - Copy is as you would expect, though) are either not used or simply do not exist at all. (When trying to move parts of this review around, what was pasted was not what I copied at all, and all of the spaces were stripped out of it - moreover, what was pasted was something that was deleted earlier, instead of what was actually copied.)
9: The typing lag. Why is a 1.1GHz machine lagging, and sometimes briefly hanging, when typing and navigating text-boxes? (This baffles me, incidentally, in light of how responsive everything else generally is.)
All of that said, I'm sure that as I get used to Android and its nuances, I'll get on better with it. *That* said, this is far from the intuitive and polished OS that Joe Everyday can use without trouble that I was led to believe Android already is - it seems to me that it's got quite a way to go before it's that polished, yet (although for an OS this young, I suppose that it is alright). It's at least good enough that I do already want to see how much better it will become, though. (I must say that I'm glad that this isn't the stock OS on the Pandora - I can't imagine it being in any way practical on there, given the issues I've come across, and given the fact that it clearly works a little bit closer to coherently when using the tablet half on its own.)
These are my impressions so far, after a few hours of use. I'll continue to add to this thread (although if there are any replies, I'll do so in new posts, rather than editing the parent-post) in order to add more impressions over the course of the coming week, as I get more used to using this alien new system.
If anyone has any questions about the device, I'll do my best to answer.
I went for this machine in particular, because I wanted something that was a bit more flexible than just a tablet (whilst still able to act as one on occasions where that's all I need), and as a means to take another step into switching over to ARM-based computers, since x86, most of the time, is overkill (and runs too hot) for the vast majority of my requirements.
My impressions of the hardware are good - it's very solid, and the laptop half has a good keyboard (it's of the "Scrabble-tile" variety, which I understand some folks don't get on well with, but I do fine with this type of keyboard, myself - I'm already almost up to my full typing speed after only a couple of hours with it). Both the tablet and keyboard halves have a nicely-textured surface, and feel quite "grippy", which I appreciate, as it makes it clear that plenty of thought went into this aspect of the design.
The keyboard half has two USB ports (both behind neat little doors of the very same sort that the Nintendo 3DS and DSi use to shield their SD Card slot), and a full-sized SD Card slot (to supplement the microSD slot on the tablet part of the unit), which comes with one of those neat little plastic "blanks" to keep dust out. When shutting the lid whilst docked, the screen goes off, just as it would on any other laptop.
The screen, a capactive one which apparently has very tough glass, is pretty responsive, although it's not as good for dragging items around (something which seems to be needed often on this device) as a resistive touch-screen is. This half of the device has a decent heft to it, but at the same time, it isn't too heavy - it feels substantial, and not at all flimsy, and it isn't ridiculously thin, which I was glad of.
All in all, this aspect of it is much, much better than the last Asus hardware that I used, which was the (in my view and experience, somewhat shonky) original EeePC 4G model. This feels like it will last, and even though the screen is meant for poking, prodding, and swiping with your fingers, this doesn't really seem to show much when you're using it in laptop form.
The software, however, has not made such a good first impression on me. If I had to describe Android in its current form in one word, it would be "unintuitive". From the very first moment with it, it has mostly been that.
When I first powered the unit on, I was greeted with a language select screen, bearing a drop-down list and a button with which to proceed, and nothing else. Trying to scroll down the list, by moving my finger down it, did nothing. It took several seconds before I clicked my mind into trying to move the list down by moving it upwards (which is a very counterintuitive way to move *down* a list), and this worked. Not a great start. It was responsive enough, at least, though. Unfortunately, this counterintuitiveness continued, and has not yet abated during my time with the machine so far. (As a side-note, according to some reviews, this scrolling weirdness also occurred when using the trackpad on the dock part, but this has been fixed on the retail units, and the trackpad behaves as it does on any other laptop.)
The next issue I encountered was that during the setup process, you cannot join a wireless network with a hidden SSID - you can only do this by skipping this step during setup, and trying to find the cryptically-hidden settings dialogue in order to join it once the initial setup is completed. Thankfully, once the option is found (and it's not intuitive to find it, since Android, or at least "Honeycomb", seems to rely quite a lot on expecting you to know exactly what obscure pictograms mean in order to navigate through it's interface), getting connected is very easy indeed.
It's bizarre how some parts of the interface - not surprisingly, the ones that don't stray from the established norms that almost all other systems, both desktop and portable, use - are quite simple and intuitive, but the ones that seem to have had effort put into "simplifying" them are not intuitive at all. It doesn't feel very cohesive to me, at all.
The next niggles I came across, I have yet to solve.
1: The desktop backgrounds that I prepared for the device, which are all sized at what is advertised as the native resolution for this machine (1280x800) are displayed massively zoomed-in, and the OS insists on me cropping them - which it then promptly ignores anyway, and simply crops to a spot vaguely close to what I actually set.
2: There is no option to stop the very annoying auto-suggest feature in the web browser, nor any way (when docked) of stopping the down and right arrows from hopping across all of the buttons present on a web-page if you happen to press down or right when on the last line of text you are writing in a text-entry box.
3: There seems to be no shortcut for hopping between tabs when using the keyboard.
4: If you accidentally press the back button (which is annoying mapped to the right-click on the keyboard dock), there doesn't seem to be any way of going forwards again - this caused the loss of the almost-completed original text of this review, and caused me to add this problem to the list during my re-write.
5: The icons in the Gmail app. They make no sense whatsoever, and there is no text to help clear up the mystery that they represent - I have never seen a worse interface (and I still remember how bad the early-2000s version of The GIMP was!). Why is an angry alien face the icon for "Mark as Spam"? I appreciate that this face is probably meant to resemble the Android mascot character, but even with this in mind, it doesn't make any sense either. Gmail's web interface is MUCH better than this, and I'm very disappointed to see that it hasn't been retained here.
6: Once I type a few words in a text-box, the cursor appears to be a space ahead of where it actually should be, making it look as though spaces have been typed which are not actually there.
7: The irritating message informing me about Automatic Google Sign-in taking place *every single time* I open a new tab in the web-browser. I cannot see a way of turning this off, short of turning off that whole feature, which I don't want to do.
8: When using the keyboard, standard shortcuts for certain operations (for example, Cut, and Paste - Copy is as you would expect, though) are either not used or simply do not exist at all. (When trying to move parts of this review around, what was pasted was not what I copied at all, and all of the spaces were stripped out of it - moreover, what was pasted was something that was deleted earlier, instead of what was actually copied.)
9: The typing lag. Why is a 1.1GHz machine lagging, and sometimes briefly hanging, when typing and navigating text-boxes? (This baffles me, incidentally, in light of how responsive everything else generally is.)
All of that said, I'm sure that as I get used to Android and its nuances, I'll get on better with it. *That* said, this is far from the intuitive and polished OS that Joe Everyday can use without trouble that I was led to believe Android already is - it seems to me that it's got quite a way to go before it's that polished, yet (although for an OS this young, I suppose that it is alright). It's at least good enough that I do already want to see how much better it will become, though. (I must say that I'm glad that this isn't the stock OS on the Pandora - I can't imagine it being in any way practical on there, given the issues I've come across, and given the fact that it clearly works a little bit closer to coherently when using the tablet half on its own.)
These are my impressions so far, after a few hours of use. I'll continue to add to this thread (although if there are any replies, I'll do so in new posts, rather than editing the parent-post) in order to add more impressions over the course of the coming week, as I get more used to using this alien new system.
If anyone has any questions about the device, I'll do my best to answer.
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