The hoarding continues...$60 Asus Transformer T100T - and Mini review

[knave]

After my great experience with the Microsoft Surface Pro I was hesitant to try any of the Atom powered tablets, But my desire to avoid the android ecosystem has lead me to pick up a cheap windows tablet for travel and ebooks. (my mother stole/permanently borrowed the surface.)

Does anyone have one of these?

I ultimately said yes because it has mostly positive reviews gets 11 hour battery life, and comes with a small but passible keyboard that detaches for tablet mode. I know the i5 in the surface paired with 4 GB of ram will blow the Asus with its Atom Z3740 and 2 GB away but I verified that I can put windows 10 on it and the 64 GB hard drive wasn't an issue with the surface so for $60 I'm gonna give it a go.

Let me know if this is a bad deal or if their are better options or if you have one of these and it sucks. I can always sell or repurpose it...bartop?

Thanks

[Howard_Casto]

The transformer line is a great bang for your buck.  While obviously it doesn't have the same specs, the lower price point makes it a no-brainer for specialized projects.  I'm pretty sure that one will run outrun 2006, for example. 

[knave]

So the Asus Transformer tablet came yesterday,

Funny, it was listed as "no OS" but I fired it up and it booted to a fresh install of Win 8.1. Possibly the recovery partition kicked in. 

I installed Win 10 pro, office 2016, adobe reader and steam. No issues. Slapped a micro SD card in the slot with books and videos for my trip. VLC and FB reader to play them.

For a 3 year old budget tablet its not bad. Not as sturdy nor as fast as the surface pro but the battery lasts 4x as long. and ahem only $60 so if I destroy it when I'm out in the boonies I won't cry too hard.

Pros: Full windows, functional keyboard, screen looks sharp for 1368x768, ebooks and videos look good. supposedly 8-10 hours of battery life, handy having a built in micro SD slot, Cheap!
Cons: only 2GB ram, meh build quality and plastic feel, slow for real productivity tasks. USB 3.0 port is on the keyboard so no USB in tablet mode unless I adapt the micro usb slot. Takes a long time to charge fully.
Neutral: Atom CPU seems to do the job, 42.7 GB free after I've installed office, Adobe reader and a few touch friendly steam games.

End State, This will fill my need for a long lasting media consumption device while I'm away this summer.