Asus EeePad Transformer TF101 10.1 inch Tablet PC (nVidia Tegra2 1GHz, 1Gb, 16Gb eMMC, WLAN, BT 3.0, Android 3.0)

I can highly recommend the Asus Transformer. It is my second tablet, after the Advent Vega, and it is one of the new generation of tablets that run Google's tablet OS (Honeycomb).

The first thing to point out is the appearance and build quality of the device. It looks great and feels great. It is also the most robust tablet currently available, with a subtly rubberised rear and a gorilla glass front. This baby will take a lot of punishment. In spite of this, it has a sleek look to it. It's very slim and light and the screen is simply outstanding. Battery life is fantastic; expect to get 6-8 hours of heavy use in real life conditions, so it easily lasts a full day. I charge it once every 2 or 3 days.

When you turn it on you will be knocked out by the screen -- clear, vibrant and beautiful to use. My only complaint is that it is *very* reflective, so you will struggle to use this device outside on a bright day. The screen is widescreen (unlike the iPad's odd dimensions) so movies and photos look *outstanding*.

Performance-wise the device is fine. It's not quite as smooth as an iPad but perfectly usable and there is no noticeable lag in any task that I have carried out (although I have not really experimented with movies).

Standard Android apps run fine on it but apps designed for tablets, obviously, look better -- and the list is growing. At the time of writing this review, Taptu, IMDB, Readr, and Evernote (beta) are simply stunning on it. Because it runs Android, any paid apps for your phone will also be available on the device (via Market).

The stock keyboard is fine (Asus provide an improved version of the standard Android keyboard) but I would suggest you pay for Thumb Keyboard, which comes with phone and tablet versions built-in, and is simply wonderful and makes you forget you are not using a real keyboard.

The lack of 3G is not an issue. It tethers to an Android phone perfectly so you can use your smartphone as a wi-fi access point to connect this tablet to the Internet. This works flawlessly. It has a micro SD card slot so don't there is no need to get the 32Gb model. The standard 16Gb device with a cheap 8Gb SD card is more than adequate. The SD card makes is very easy to transfer files from your PC to the tablet.

Downsides? Not many. The screen is very reflective. There is a shortage of apps designed for tablets. It is not quite as fast as the iPad. That's about it. Android is an open, fun, cheap, creative environment and Honeycomb is an excellent tablet OS, which will get better and better. It has many advantages over the iPad, the main one being its openness. Unlike every Apple device, you will not get the feeling that this piece of hardware is a cash machine for a large corporation.

One final thing. Asus don't hinder the device with loads of add-ons so the device is supplied in a pretty pure state. This not only means it runs faster than most tablets (such as the Xoom) but it also means that OS updates can be supplied very quickly. Hoenycomb 3.1 is now available for it via an over-the-air (OTA) update.

Like your first smartphone, you'll wonder how you coped before you owned this device. The Asus Transformer is outstanding.

After much research and reading reviews i decided to purchase the Transformer tablet due to the new Honeycomb operating system, its ability to dock the keyboard and the price.

The tablet is very light and thin so perfect for my frequent travel and the ASUS custom apps work well too. The ASUS MyNet app allows you to stream music from your WiFi DLNA source so great or all my music. This app currently does not support XVID format streaming but hoping this will change in a future update. You can get round this by using an app such as MoboPlayer which will run XVID's directly from the MicroSD slot on the side of the tablet.

Battery life is great and i've only had to charge it twice in the past week on the back of a several of hours use each evening.

This is by far the best Honeycomb tablet out on the market today, easily beating the ACER and XOOM in terms of flexibility and price.

Overall an excellent tablet and highly recommended!

Superb piece of kit. Build quality is excellent - the tablet feels 'classy' and is reassuringly solid to hold.

The IPS panel display is really nice. Asus quote a 178 degree viewing angle and it is very good indeed.

With the dual 1Ghz CPU the tablet runs very nicely. Web browsing is fast and responsive and all the apps I've tried run very well.

I'm watching DVD ripped AVI's at a good quality (my standard settings - about 0.5Gb for an average 45min TV series episode - 1500 bps video) with no stutter or visible issues using VPlayer.

The supplied book reader app seems a little fussy on ePubs - closing to desktop with the PDFs I've converted using Calibre (purchased ePubs are fine). I hear Asus are on the case and an update is on the way but in the meantime FBreader, Cool Reader and Kindle all work just fine.

The Polaris office suite seems to be fine for the excel and word docs I've tried so far. For PDF viewing I've downloaded Acrobat Reader which runs well and seems to give a better view than either Polaris or the My Library apps manage.

I downloaded Nvidia's Tegra Zone app and Bang Bang racing which runs flawlessly and shows that as developers release more games for this platform its going to be an excellent mobile games player. Of course Angry Birds runs perfectly too (and the ads are not nearly as annoying on the big screen as on my HTC Desire)

Spend £20 on a 16Gb micro SD card (get one with a convertor and you can just copy files onto it from anything with a standard SD card slot) to double the storage seems a no-brainer.