ASUS Eee Pad Slider

The ASUS Eee Pad Slider has a lot to live up to. Its predecessor, the Eee Pad Transformer was universally lauded as a huge step forward for Android tablets, and with tablets increasingly pushing netbooks off the shelves, it’s important that the Slider keeps up the momentum.

What we like best

The USP of this tablet, as the name suggests, is the sliding function that moves the screen up by 40 degrees to reveal a netbook-like keyboard. This is done pretty seamlessly after a little practice, and the keyboard turns out to be perfectly usable – for editing and short communications, that is. You wouldn’t want to write a whole blog post with it unless you’re pressed for time.

On the other hand, the way the screen and the keyboard work together when browsing is an absolute joy. You can manoeuvre around a page using your fingers, and as soon as you want to chat or fill in a form, you can revert to your keyboard – very convenient and perceptive of the way people browse these days.

The ASUS Eee Pad Slider is driven by a NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, which enables high-quality video playback and good multi-tab browsing. The default operating system is Android 3.1, and a 4.0 update is in the pipeline.

There is, unusually for a tablet, a USB socket – this is a clever strike against netbooks and laptops, and makes the Eee Pad Slider even more desirable. If you are like us, and you carry around a USB stick with your current documents and projects on it, the Slider will let you pop it in and get to work wherever you are. You could also, of course, plug in a mouse.

Build on both parts of the ASUS Eee Pad Slider feels very solid, although the oddly brown colour that dominates the keyboard might take some getting used to.

What we like least

For all of its positive attributes, the Eee Pad Slider is not the most lightweight tablet out there. It weighs almost as much as a good laptop does (around 1kg) and, with its 17.7mm waist would look a bit podgy next to the super-slim iPad 2 (8.8mm).

While performance and usability are great, multimedia playback isn’t. The speakers are limited as far as bass and dynamics go, and because the 1280 x 800screen is super-glossy, images lose their quality when viewed in a brightly-lit environment.