Asus Transformer Book Duet TD300 hands-on review
The Asus Transformer Book Duet TD300 is an 13.3-inch 1920 x 1080 Full HD IPS touchscreen tablet and laptop convertible. In your hands it feels a little on the hefty side, especially when you detach the dock and try to use it as a tablet. In this mode it is a device that you will struggle to use with two hands, let a long one. As a laptop it’s about average by 2014’s standards, weighing in at 1.9kg. The Transformer Book Duet TD300 feels reasonably sturdy in your hands, the grippy plastic back isn’t going to win any beauty contests anytime soon, but it can by no means be described as an ugly convertible. We spent some time with the Transformer Book Duet TD300 at the launch event hosted at Caesar’s Palace Hotel in Las Vegas as part of CES 2014. As you can imagine, the first thing that we tested out on the convertible device is switching between OSes and we’re pleased to report that this was a seamless and intuitive experience. There is a dedicated button on the touch screen and also a physical button, both of which can be used to immediately switch from Android 4.1 Jelly Bean to Windows 8 and vice-versa. The Transformer Book Duet TD300 takes 4 seconds to do this, after that it is ready to use immediately. Importantly, we didn’t notice anything unusual when using the Transformer Book Duet TD300 on either the Windows 8 or Android OS. The device was responsive to the touch and flicked through apps and home screens with ease and no noticeable lag. What is also impressive about the Transformer Book Duet TD300 is the specs that it has on board. Let’s start with the tablet/display; this has a 13.3-inch 1920 x 1080 full HD screen, multi-touch functionality, a front-facing “HD camera”, 128GB of SSD storage, microSD card slot (up to 64GB), 4G DDR3L 1600MHz RAM and an Intel Core i7 processor. The keyboard dock also brings its fair share to the party, housing a 1TB HDD, 1 x USB 3.0 and 1 x USB 2.0 ports, a LAN port, HDMI output.
