Performance
It hasn’t even been a year since Asus let us play with the Asus EeePad Transformer Prime, one of the better Android tablets we had ever seen.
With the new Infinity model, not much has changed. The speed has been upped slightly and the screen has been improved to a higher than 1080p display, but outside of these updates, it’s very much the same product.
In fact, the keyboard dock that comes with the Infinity is closely matched with the one that was sold with the Prime, making it the first of four Transformer products that shares a keyboard dock with another, as the rest were designed differently. There is a catch, mind you, with the Prime fitting in the Infinity’s dock, but not the other way around.
The main improvements for the Infinity, however, are the performance and display, but only one of these is really noticeable.
Over in the display department, the 1920×1200 screen used on the Transformer Infinity is excellent, with clear text and images.
With the use of a Super IPS+ display in the Infinity, you can even take the tablet out into sunlight, with the very bright panel allowing you to work outdoors, making a nice change from other tablets out there. There’s still a bit of reflectivity at work, and we could certainly see ourselves in the glossy display, but providing you turn the brightness all the way up, you could work in sunlight without any major dilemmas on this Infinity.
While the screen is clear, looking at it doesn’t have the same obvious “wow” effect as we had with the Retina screen on the new iPad, but it’s still clearer than other Android tablets.
Much like with the Prime, the keyboard is pretty good. The keys are a little shallow, as expected on such a thin keyboard, but overall, it’s a decent typing experience with no letters missed in our typing test.
In fact, this review was written on the Infinity, and we had very few problems, which is a better result than last year’s Asus ZenBook Ultrabook, one of the machines the Infinity draws some design inspiration from.
The feeling of the machine is still pretty high grade, with a solid brushed aluminium enclosure and Corning’s Gorilla Glass 2 protecting the 10.1 inch Full HD screen.
By itself, the screen and tablet section has a light weight to it, with a metal finish that manages to be less slippery than the one found on Apple’s iPad. Once connected with the keyboard dock section, the machine carries much more heft, closer to a netbook and laptop than that of a tablet.
Battery life is pretty similar to past models, with the combination of battery in the tablet’s screen section and recharging battery in the dock providing roughly 10 to 12 hours, though you could probably reach the Asus expected time of 14 hours with WiFi switched off.
