Asus Transformer Book TX300CA Review

The core strength of Windows 8 lies in its touch-driven Modern UI and the only way to experience it is on a Windows 8 tablet, which are quite rare in our market. Windows RT tablets are pretty pointless since you’re restricted to Modern apps with no legacy app support. Full-blown Windows 8 tablets are much better, productivity-wise, but the cheaper ones all run Atom so they’re not exactly powerful. This leaves us with the high-end tablets/hybrid device, which, more often than not, are out of reach for many buyers. Asus’s latest Transformer Book fits into that latter category. Let’s see if it functions as well as it looks.

Design and build

Asus is known for superior build quality and it shows in spades in the Transformer Book. The entire device is constructed out of aluminium, giving it a very industrial and premium look. The 13.3-inch full HD IPS display produces very good colours along with very good viewing angles. However, we did notice some alarming backlight bleeding towards the bottom and right sides of the screen when displaying a black screen. This could be an issue with just our unit, however. Upfront, we have an HD camera and an illuminated Windows logo for switching between Modern UI and the desktop.

Excellent design and build

The buttons on the tablet includes a power/sleep toggle, volume rocker, 3.5 mm headphone jack, microSD card slot and a microHDMI port. The hybrid also supports Asus’s SonicMaster sound through a single stereo speaker placed behind the screen along with the 5MP shooter. Unlike the keyboard dock in Asus’s Transformer Pad series, the Book’s dock houses a 500GB hard drive along with a battery and additional ports like a standard SD card slot, miniDP port, Gigabit LAN, two USB 3.0 and a stereo speaker. This expands the functionality of the Transformer Book by a great deal, converting it into a full-fledged Ultrabook.

The Transformer Book is quite heavy at 1.9 Kg when docked in, but as a tablet, it’s a lot more comfortable to hold. The weight distribution is done pretty well, so the large display doesn’t really feel that heavy to hold. The back of the notebook is completely sealed off, with just four rubber feet supporting it.

Comfortable keyboard

Features

The Transformer Book comes in with a Core i5 or i7 flavouring and the unit we received had the former. The Intel Core i5-3337U is a new addition to Intel's portfolio and it boasts of a dual-core, 22nm CPU with HyperThreading running at 1.8GHz and a Turbo frequency of 2.7GHz. This is a follow-up to Intel's very popular CPU, the i5-3317U, which was launched a year ago. Not much has changed in this CPU apart from a slight bump in core speed. There’s 4GB of DDR3 RAM onboard and a 128GB SSD in the tablet on which the OS is installed. The 500GB hard drive is installed in the keyboard dock, so the drives are only available when docked in. The Book comes bundled with Windows 8 Professional and ships with a carrying case.

Plenty of ports

Performance

Windows 8 runs incredibly smooth in desktop mode and the touch sensitivity is spot on as well. The full HD IPS panel is very good for either watching movies or working on a speadsheet. The notebook is a little top heavy and due to this, you can’t use it very comfortably on your lap as you would a regular notebook, as it keeps toppling. The brushed aluminium finish on the palm rest feels great and the chiclet keys are very comfortable to type on. The keys are also backlit so you can work through the night without an issue. The keys themselves are quite large and have a soft touch without sacrificing tactility. There’s a new shortcut button on the keyboard, which brings up a customised console giving you a quick overview of your entire system and settings. Our review unit had a screen flickering issue, which would intermittently occur every time we docked it in. It also refused to detect the battery in the keyboard so we had to make do with just the battery in the tablet.

Battery life

The tablet packs in a 38Whr battery, which gave us pretty good performance in Battery Eater Pro. We managed to get 2 hours and 28 minutes, which roughly translates to about 4-5-hours of real world usage. This is not bad considering we haven’t counted the battery in the dock as well.

Verdict and price in India

Asus has once again built a very finely crafted and desirable product, but that’s not enough to make a it a commercial success. The Core i5 variant of the Transformer Book is priced at a whopping Rs 91,999, which we find exorbitantly expensive. Samsung’s ATIV hybrid PC shares a similar configuration (minus the 500GB HDD) and design and is priced almost Rs 20,000 lesser. Our other main issue with the Transformer Book is the weight. It’s simply too heavy to be carried around as a complete notebook. Asus has created a very good tablet, with great connectivity, but sadly, it doesn’t work very well as notebook as far as portability is concerned.