Asus Transformer Pad 300 Series review: first look

Jonathan Bray February 28, 2012

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The number of new tablets that have been launched at this year’s MWC is mind boggling, but the one that could just be the most significant is Asus’ humble Transformer Pad 300 Series.

Introduced alonside the Padfone and Transformer Pad Infinity 700 series, the 300 Series could be seen as the ugly duckling of the Transformer family. It doesn’t have a better than Full HD screen like the Infinity, it isn’t a three-in-one do-it-all device like the Padfone, and it doesn’t look as sleek and lovely as the Transformer Pad Prime.

However, the 300 series is set to be the cheapest of the lot, and could break new ground in the tablet market when it eventually appears on the shelves.

So how many compromises does the 300 series actually make? Well, in terms of build quality it isn’t as good as the Prime. The rear of the tablet is plastic (and comes in a variety of different colours) and so is the keyboard dock. After a brief session with the keyboard, we felt it was just as usable as the keyboard on the Prime, but more rattly.

It’s still a pretty handsome tablet, though, especially in white. It measures a mere 9.9mm thick and the tablet part on its own weighs a reasonable 635g – only 34g heavier than the Wi-Fi iPad 2.

Another area to exhibit cutbacks is the 10.1in display – no Super IPS+ 1,920 x 1,200 resolution screen here. Instead, the resolution is 1,280 x 1,024, but that’s no bad thing. After all, only a few months ago this represented the pinnacle of tablet screen achievement, and it’s still an IPS panel with ten-point multitouch.

There’s nothing wrong with the screen at all: it looked bright and colourful on the stand – as good if not better than many of the previous generation of Android Honeycomb tablets.

Finally, to the specification. In what is set to be Asus’ cheapest Transformer, surely here is where compromises have been made. But no, the 300 Series comes with Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3, backed by 1GB of RAM and 16GB of storage with an additional 8GB of free lifetime storage from Asus’ WebStorage cloud service. We could find no mention of a microSD slot, however.

Again, that translates to perfectly acceptable performance. With Android 4 installed on the tablet, it felt snappy and smooth under the finger, and scrolling up and down websites was as buttery smooth as you’d expect from a Tegra 3 device.

Even battery life looks to be ample, with a claimed ten hours for the tablet, and 15 hours with the keyboard dock connected. The rear camera is an 8-megapixel autofocus unit which also shoots 1080p video, and there’s a 1.2-megapixel video call camera facing the front.

All-in-all we’re impressed by the Transformer Pad 300 Series, and have great hopes that when it eventually ships, it will do so at the right price. If it does, we could have a potential market leader on our hands: a cheap tablet that’s actually very good. Apple should be nervously looking over its shoulder.