Cheer up you miserable blogger.

I have just reread my last posts and I am a little concerned that I may be coming over as a bit of a wingeing negative gimmer.

To redress the balance a bit what do I like about the ASUS Transformer?

• The screen is beautiful , colours are bright , the high resolution makes photographs and videos beautiful. (make sure you install Moboplayer and QQplayer, both free from the android market, and you have support for many codecs such as DIVX and MKV).
• Software is nippy.
• Battery life with the tablet on its own is great, when you attach the keyboard , which has another battery built into it, the battery lasts for 12 hours plus. This is where the tablet scores over a laptop and my netbook.
• Buy the keyboard dock, it adds 2 full sized USBs , the extra battery , a good fullsized keyboard and it acts as a stand for the tablet. When closed it protects the screen.
• When mounted on the keyboard the device recognises a wireless mouse , I plugged in my Logitech Mouse,( it has the mini universal transmitter that plugs into the USB), and the mouse worked straight away without installation of any extra drivers. It also recognises full sized wired keyboard and a wired mouse each plugged into a different USB.
• The keyboard makes the unit into a good netbook replacement for email, word processing and excel . The ASUS Transformer ships with Polaris Office which is a Microsoft Office compatible suit of programs.
• It supports a wii remote control to play N64 Emulators.
• Browsing with the tablet on your knee is great .
• Media streaming from other PCs works smoothly.

So smile you cheerless blogger.

MINDSHIFT time:  it’s NOT a phone

An obvious one this one but took me a while to grasp a quite a subtle shift for the Android phone user. The Android tablet is not a phone and you don’t have to use it like a phone, let me explain…..

I've had an android phone for around a year, an HTC Desire and I love it. It has taken over from my itouch as my media player of choice , I synch podcasts each week and play them through my radio on the way to work, it  handles social networks , calendars and emails, it even takes photos of technology equipment reviews in WHSmiths so I can avoid buying magazines! (cheap)

Because screen size is so small, phone users rely on apps to deliver content and perform processes; Apps are dedicated to a single use and are configured to the small screen size. To use the browsers on the Desire is doable but a pain in the backside, text visibility is difficult without Panning and scanning across the website.  Apps are great, but apps are only as great as the developer and there are quite a few p*ss poor apps about.

When I got my Asus Transformer I initially treated it like a phone I downloaded a shed full of apps and my home screens look like I've thrown a handful of apps across the room and they have installed where they have stuck.

The Android Marketplace has only a limited number of apps which are optimised for the large screen size (although most work in some form or another) The number of Honeycomb apps are increasing all the time but why rely on apps anymore? We now have a lovely big screen that the browser can now be used alongside of apps.While apps are being scaled up to match the honeycomb screen resolution, the HTML world is scaled up and ready be used  ... For example  if you are looking for a news aggregator there are many sites that can do this www.news now.co.uk is one such site.

A big positive for the ASUS Transformer and Android tablets in general is the support for Flash, most websites just work.

All this may seem obvious to some but a little MINDSHIFT opens the potential of the tablet.

A thumbs up for the Transformer