News - ASUS Transformer Book range to be expanded following IFA event

[HEXUS]

Transformer Book T300 Chi and Transformer Book T200 expected to make an appearance.

Read more.

[Tpyo]

Silly (yet sensible) question but... If windows 9 is going to give you a hard choice between desktop mode and tablet/ARM mode - is an exception going to be made for devices like this? Otherwise, the (formerly metro) interface would hobble the laptop form of this, while the desktop only interface would make the tablet form almost useless!

[crossy]

£299 for the T200 looks like a reasonable deal to me, but why, oh why Asus have you given it the possibility of storage expansion (good) but only 2GB RAM (bad). 4GB RAM for that price and you'd have a hit.

The Chi has an impressive 12.5-inch 2560 x 1480 screen, supports 4G connectivity and is extremely thin.

The MBP-style "thinner is better" is getting daft - especially with a device like the Chi (which has all the "workings" in the screen) I'd argue that thinner is worse because you end up with a keyboard/dock that lacks the weight to stop the whole lot tipping backwards unless you have the screen vertical (which makes it difficult to see).

Am I in Asus-fan-boy mode or are devices such as these (if they had a decent amount of memory!) getting good enough that you could easily consider them instead of a normal laptop for a lot of uses. (Gaming laptops and "professional workstations" are excluded of course because of the unique requirements that they have).

Silly (yet sensible) question but... If windows 9 is going to give you a hard choice between desktop mode and tablet/ARM mode - is an exception going to be made for devices like this? Otherwise, the (formerly metro) interface would hobble the laptop form of this, while the desktop only interface would make the tablet form almost useless!

I don't think anyone outside of Microsoft knows the answer to that question - although like you I'd expect W9 to be smart enough to switch to "tablet mode", i.e. MUI, if you detached the keyboard. So if you've got mouse+keyboard (especially keyboard) then you get "classic" interface, detach and you get MUI with touch driven menus and a virtual (i.e. onscreen) keyboard.
Put it this way, if I was on the design team then that's how I'd do it.

[Zhaoman]

I'm waiting for Broadwell to arrive before bagging myself something like this but yes these more portable form factors are what I'm looking for now. A tablet such as the Surface Pro 3 is the perfect computing device for me but I'm not in dire need so I'll wait

[Brewster0101]

£299 for the T200 looks like a reasonable deal to me, but why, oh why Asus have you given it the possibility of storage expansion (good) but only 2GB RAM (bad). 4GB RAM for that price and you'd have a hit.

Currently using the T100 with 2GB RAM and it runs very very well. Windows 8 does seem very well optimised for 2GB of RAM for low usage. Even Half Life 2 (full PC version) works like a charm....

[crossy]

I'm waiting for Broadwell to arrive before bagging myself something like this but yes these more portable form factors are what I'm looking for now. A tablet such as the Surface Pro 3 is the perfect computing device for me but I'm not in dire need so I'll wait

Did you see the bit in the article that said:

Last month ASUS was said to be incorporating Intel's first Broadwell chip, the Intel Core M, into the upcoming Transformer Book T300 Chi

And personally, I'd trust Asus' design team over Microsoft's since the former definitely has a track record of designing good devices. If the Chi was £499 (possible?) then I'd take that over a Surface Pro 3 without much thought being needed. (Yes, I'm an Asus fan boy).

Currently using the T100 with 2GB RAM and it runs very very well. Windows 8 does seem very well optimised for 2GB of RAM for low usage. Even Half Life 2 (full PC version) works like a charm....

Interesting to know (thanks!), although the "low usage" caveat would worry me if the T-series device was my main one. I'd assumed that 2GB RAM would result in much swapping/paging going on - which is going to prematurely age the SSD. Actually the T100 looks like a very interesting device - less than £250 for the full "Windows experience", which is the same price more-or-less as a less capable (in my mind) Surface 2. Oh, and at that price I'm thinking that it makes a lot of mainstream Android tablets look a tad overpriced.

[Saracen]

....

Am I in Asus-fan-boy mode or are devices such as these (if they had a decent amount of memory!) getting good enough that you could easily consider them instead of a normal laptop for a lot of uses. (Gaming laptops and "professional workstations" are excluded of course because of the unique requirements that they have).

...

Short answer .... Yes.

Longer version ....

It is, of course, a personal judgement, and at the risk of sounding like an announcement from the Ministry of the Bleepin' Obvious, it does depend on what your "lot of uses" includes. They're not (yet) at the point of replacing everything I potentially would use a power laptop for, especially if that laptop was a desktop-replacement type model. So, a universal panacea for everybody's portable computing needs they aren't. But while I've been teetering on the edge of replacing my current laptop, I haven't yet done so .... partly because I'm not looking to spend a lot, and I'm not happy with W8. I haven't quite found the right machine at the right price. So I've struggled on with my current machine which, while coping with what I need to do, is getting a bit threadbare. For example, the battery is shot, and it's good I can touchtype, as most of the keyboard legends have worn off. And more similar aging problems too.

Nonetheless, I can still get by with the old clunker. And it's an Athlon XP1700 with 512MB RAM. If I can cope in doing what I need, and pretty much what I want to do, with that, then I think the Transformers will cope nicely.

So, it all depends (IMHO) what you want of a laptop, and of course, tablet. It would, I suspect, do me okay.