mystery box
oh what’s this? mail order gf from bangladesh? nope. hmmm…
oh wow!
yes! it’s the Asus Transformer T100TA 10.1″ tablet that I bought on ebay for around $100. Considering that you get a quad core baytrail cpu, 2 GBs RAM, and a super swag transforming tablet that is sure to impress the ladies, I’d say this is one epic deal. Let’s see what she can do,
would you just look at that screen?
Yep you read that right. This tablet sports a quad core Atom Z3740 that powers Windows 8.1 fairly well. This isn’t your old Atom of crappy netbooks past; Intel improved the performance per clock by 50%. But 150% of really frikin slow, isn’t exactly fast. And with only 2GBs of RAM, Windows 8.1 runs well, but not as well as my i5 powered laptop. Intel also added the same GPU that you’d find in ivy bridge’s HD4000, which easily supports resolutions of 2560X1600 pixels. Even though the IPS screen is only 1366×768 pixels, it’s still bright and vibrant and great for watching like cat videos. Furthermore, I’ll definitely be using the micro HDMI out on a 1080p monitor at work, for super awesome Portal tabbing.
However, most of these Atom tablets are stuck with eMMC hard drives. And they are slow:
With a read speed of around 70MB/s, your average mechanical hard drive is nearly twice as fast. I wasn’t able to test write speeds but it should even slower than 70MB/s. Over the weekend, I’m going to try to install an SSD with 400MB/s read/write speeds. Because I’m a badass…
my transformer is ready … …
Pretty cool, just press that button and bam! tablet mode activated. Instead of wasting time at work scribbling specs on notepads, I can transform and then scribble them on the tablet. #savetherainforests Or I can just type them using the included dock. A lot of netbooks and other tablets have crappy keyboards, but this one is nice and clicky and surprisingly, not too cramped.
In conclusion, I love my Transformer. It’s great for internet users, and probably some light gaming. For the purpose of answering tickets online and running between datacenters while looking super cool while impressing the ladies, it’s priceless.
This review, brought to you by Sunbelt Chocolate Chip chewy granola bars. yummmm.