Asus Eee Slate EP121 review

The Asus Eee Slate EP121 is not designed to take on the iPad. It’s important to get that out of the way immediately, because it’s an unfair comparison made by pretty much everyone we’ve shown it to. This Windows 7 tablet is aimed far more at professionals than those looking for their daily hit of Angry Birds.

The internals give that away immediately. Rather than crawling along on Atom power, the Eee Slate has a 1.3GHz Core i5-470UM processor – a low-voltage part that, while not quite as full-fat as it sounds, offers vastly more power than other popular tablets. Along with 4GB of DDR3, it completed our real-world benchmarks with an overall score of 0.39, and managed some excellent scores in our Media tests: it proved nearly three times faster than the AMD Brazos chip in the Acer Iconia W500.

That makes video and photo editing, along with all manner of other graphical work, a realistic option, as we proved by comfortably editing a 1080p video in Sony Vegas Pro 10. Sure, once you’re done creating, it won’t blitz through the encoding as fast as a workstation laptop, despite its 64GB of flash storage, but then most workstation laptops don’t have the Eee Slate’s touchscreen and digitiser pen.

Open a flap on the top-right edge and out it pops, allowing you to scrawl and tap your way around interfaces that a finger prod just wouldn’t be able to navigate. This single addition gets you past all of the usual problems we have with Windows 7 on touch devices, such as the list menus and the tiny window controls. We’re not going to pretend the Eee Slate turns Windows into iOS or Android, but on a screen this large it’s certainly usable, particularly if you up the DPI to 125%.

What it can do that those rival OSs can’t is run full Windows applications. To this end Asus has bundled the Eee Slate with a rebranded Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard, as well as a folding leather case with two rear flaps that prop the screen at comfortable angles, in a similar fashion to an iPad case.