Asus Transformer Infinity Launch – Hands-On

I was in Sydney yesterday for the launch of the newest Asus tablet the Transformer Infinty, the first full HD screen Android tablet with a resolution of 1920×1200. The tablet looks great and Asus has certainly thought a lot about the tablet so, how did it go.

Design wise, Asus has kept with the concentric circle design embedded into an aluminium back plate on the device which is topped with what appears to be a plastic or rubber band across the top of the unit which houses the WiFi and GPS antennas to get around any issues that may occur with reception as was seen on the Transformer Prime which necessitated the release of a GPS dongle to improve reception. The tablet itself weighs 607grams and is only 8.5 mm thin and with the keyboard dock it goes to just over 1kg in weight.

The tablet runs really nicely, it scrolls backwards and forwards through home screens with no perceptible lag, Gaming and applications ran smoothly, the review units they had on display had been going for a few hours and still had a fair amount of battery life in them, they did say the Gorilla Glass 2 screen is pretty strong but forgive me for not wanting to test that out on my own devices.

Spec Wise it is pretty fully loaded :

• 10.1″ Super IPS+ Display at 1920×1200, 600nits, 178° viewing angle
• Corning Gorilla Glass 2
• Quad-Core 1.6GHz Tegra 3 CPU
• 1 GB RAM
• 64GB On-Board Storage
• microSD Card Slot in Tablet – Full Size SD Card Slot in Keyboard Dock
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth V3.0
• Front facing 2MP Camera, 8MP Rear Camera with LED Flash and F/2.2 lens
• Ice Cream Sandwich
• Tablet Ports:
  • 2-1 3.5mm Audio Jack – Headphone Out and Mic in
  • microHDMI 1.4a port
  • MicroSD Card Slot
  • Internal Microphone
  • Stereo Speakers
• Keyboard Dock Ports :
• USB2.0 Port
• SD Card Slot
• Battery Life
• Pad Only : 9.5 Hours
• With Keyboard dock : 14 Hours
• Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

The TF700 ships with a few apps baked in, Super Note – a note taking application, it actually allows you to do handwriting on the go for really quick note taking but also fully supports keyboard input. My Library – an ebook reading application, it supports ePub and PDF books and also has access to an online store for more books. My Cloud – a Splastop based remote desktop application, Asus advised it is Windows only for now, they have not tested with Windows 8 as yet. App Locker – an application which gives you the option to password protect apps so that people borrowing your tablet can’t access apps you don’t want them to, no more unwanted Social Networking updates and finally they offer a My Backup which appears to be very similar in functionality to Titanium Backup from what I could see in our initial briefing.

I asked a few questions based on your feedback from the initial post I put up, there may possibly be a 32GB version coming, but no pricing or dates have been set it is still only a maybe at this stage. No plans at this stage for a 3G/4G version although I’m sure if the constant feedback was for a 3G/4G version they would look into it. I was unable to confirm if the microSD Card slot supported MicroSDXC. The TF700 ships with ICS but as we’ve seen a Jelly Bean upgrade is on the way but no dates were given, it will be interesting to see how Project Butter goes on the TF700 as it has a pretty good touch response already.

I have requested a review unit and will hopefully get one ASAP, so any questions you have I can answer, the retail price has been set at $999 but as you can see JB Hifi has it already for $894 and with JB I’m pretty sure if you start haggling you could probably get it for less :