Surprisingly Impressed, January 1, 2012

I purchased three of the tablets for my grandkids and was impressed with all that it could do as compared to my Nook tablet. The only reason I don’t give five stars is because there is a lack of instructions. I consider myself in the normal range as far as computer knowledge goes and can easily learn with some direction. I wanted to set the tablets up to be able to borrow from the public library but couldn’t get that part to work yet. However, the App marketplace had a nice App for free books that my granddaughter was quite pleased with. Overall, I am quite pleased, too because it does just about what my Nook tablet does, although not quite as smooth, but it does the job and is a great beginner tablet at a fraction of the cost.

I now have to upgrade my review because of the way my issue was handles by customer service. I am very pleased with this product – from the order through resolving an issue I had. Deliver was very quick. I had a problem with one of the tablets. Customer support was very courteous and reacted quickly. I returned the item and I had a replacement in less than a week. My grandkids love them, and don’t fight as much with each other when they come over because now they have something to keep them busy.

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great buy no china OS installed, US android market preinstalled & gingerbread OS, January 24, 2012

Its all in the title baby, not another junk tablet, this tablets very responsive to the touch not laggy like some of the cheap ones i have seen. The g-sensor works great, do some homework & compare these specs to a samsung galaxy Tab. & you have a bargin. No cons here the techs who run this company know what they are doing to preinstall the softwares needed to make this work for us in the U-S of -A. I look forward to seeing more products from these guys, and what there capable of with more tablets.

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Forget The Big Red Fruit, April 25, 2012

By 

J. R. O. Neal “Islidur” (Denver) –

  

This is an awesome tablet. Extremely powerful and versatile. Some purists will say the display isn’t up to par, but that’s ridiculous. This is a stunning display even if it falls short of the highest pixel count available. The performance is better than the iPad 3, it’s a beautiful device and it offers the unique ability to pop into a keyboard base and “transform” into a laptop. Combine that with it’ s low price and Apple is outdone and forgotten. Buy it now.

Update
I originally bought this for my wife, after spending some time using the tablet, I’ve decided to purchase another one for myself. Ease of use, convenience, portability and awesome power make it a better option for me than my laptop.

The unit is made of plastic, but it’s very sturdy and I feel it will last quite a while, I did order a leather case for it though. As I previously stated, the screen is great regardless of what anyone else says. I have poor eyesight, but I can clearly read the screen even with full sun shining on it. I tested the GPS with the unit tethered to my iPhone and it works flawlessly. Wifi reception is so good, it found more servers around my house than any other device I own and has had full strength connected to mine since I fired it up, regardless of where I use it in the house.

I was able to easily conect to my main computer via DLNA and stream the music and videos I have stored there. There are litterally too many features on this tablet to list individually and I know I haven’t even found all of them yet. So far, there’s nothing I’ve tried to do with it that’s slowed it down.

I did notice two glitches; the browser shut down a couple of times for no reason and had a hard time coming back up. I think this is a problem with ICS and will probably be fixed with the next update. Also, the on screen ASUS keyboard is very glitchy. I was constantly hitting backspace while writing lengthy messages because it would misspell (even though I hit the right key) and would put spaces in the middle of some words. I haven’t tried the Google keyboard yet because I decided to just use the dock from now on for long messages.

One more note. I’ve used an iPad before and have owned an iPhone since it was released. The Apple OS is more polished than Android, but Android has come very far since it’s humble beginnings and I believe it will surpass IOS very soon. But, it’s good enough now for us to thoroughly enjoy these tablets and has given me a reason to ditch our iPhones and go with Samsung Galaxy S’s as well.

Update
Having spent an extended amount of time with the tablet, I’ve got a few observations.
First, there is some light bleed on the screen edges, but under normal circumstances it’s not noticable.
Second, on top of shutting down occassionally the browser is very slow to extremely slow. I believe this is more an Android issue than a tablet issue and I hope it will be corrected with an update.
Third, the tablet has 3 performance settings. Initially, I left it on the default balanced setting. I’ve discovered that MANY times video will not play unless I switch to the high performance setting. I’ve decided to just leave it on the higher setting and sufffer the battery drain.
Fourth, for some reason, you cannot use a usb extension cable. It won’t work for power or data with any cable extention. This is dissapointing as I’d like to sit on the couch and charge at the same time, but the stock cable is too short.

I still believe it’s a great tablet and will only get better with software updates, but right now it suffers from glitchy, slow apps and OS. I’ve dropped my review by 1 star due to the software issues.

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I have so much love to give REVISED AGAIN, May 23, 2012

UPDATE 3: Please check each individual section in my “PRIOR REVIEW” for updates on those particular items. I will do one more small update later.

UPDATE 2: This is just a short update just to let everyone that the replacement TF300 has for all extensive purposes been a home run. This is the tablet I wanted to love and it keeps giving me reasons to love it more. I will do a more in depth update later in the next few days but for now just let me say BUY THIS TABLET. I’m very happy I just got a defective unit the first time around. No strike 2 for ASUS. I’ll leave my prior review in place just in case someone gets a tab that was doing the same thing.

UPDATE 1: Just to keep those interested in buying up to date. ASUS responded very quickly to my review (see comments) and after a few emails back and forth they also think I have a faulty tablet. For those interested I’ll post some excerpts in the comments, I do go into a bit more detail on some of the errors.

PRIOR REVIEW:

Well, I’ll get right to it. I want to LOVE this tablet. I did a lot of research and knew this was it for me. I received my tablet and started putting it through the paces. All was well for about a week, then it started rebooting over and over again. First it was rebooting after every song on Pandora. So I uninstalled the app and reinstalled it. Ok, problem solved. Not quite. Angry Birds Space froze, tablet rebooted. Now I’m getting suspicious. Pandora made it reboot. EVERYTHING made it reboot. Keep in mind all this was yesterday that it got all kooky. I am on the latest firmware. I did a cold boot (power off, unplugged, power button+volume down) and was hoping for the best. Nope. Getting my google play on and then silence. Look at the tablet and it’s rebooting. So I start opening apps to test again. I open Dolpin Browser, Gallery, Super Note, and My Library, all but one come PREINSTALLED on the tablet. I go to open Pandora and don’t even get to touch the icon before it’s rebooting again. So I want to run that scenario, open the same apps, it’s fine. I have the tab in the keyboard dock and I go to open Netflix. The screen goes to portrait then back to landscape and nothing happens. So I say screw it and put Google play back on again. I let it play over night, it did not restart, but the music did pause. Fine. I hit play in the morning and like 15 seconds in it restarts. I am returning this tablet and hoping it’s just a defective unit. From the reviews it sounds it is. But I will make some comments on how it was when it did work.

Display

People say it’s not as nice as the new IPAD. Well it’s not, IPAD is a premium unit sold at a premium price. I’m not gonna compare a Hyundai to a high end Mercedes. Is a super duper HD screen really worth THAT much more? Not for me. Compare the Transformer Infinity to the IPAD. That said, the screen is great. Reading books is no problem, my pictures look awesome, games look very detailed. LITTLE bit of bleeding on the bottom (landscape) but as others have stated, only on black back grounds and really it doesn’t take away from anything. It’s not burn your eyes out bright as the Prime, but it’s plenty bright. At home I usually keep it at 50%, in my office I might max it out, but in my defense 3 of my 4 walls are windows really so I get a lot of sunlight in here. It’s plenty bright. I sort of think we’ve all been pampered and spoiled by gorgeous screens and I can honestly say this is one is just that. It’s just not super duper IPS HDx400. Stop, it’s great, plenty good, especially for the price. I’ve thrown some HD video at it looks awesome. And I’m a little snobby when it comes to these things, I’m happy with the display. It’s also (when it works) very responsive out of box.

UPDATE: Not much to add to this. I still feel it’s plenty bright for the average person. Resolution is fine, HD video looks great. HD games and apps look great. Non-HD apps are a little pixelated but that’s not a display issue, that’s an android issue because (and apple does do this better) not every app is made to be displayed on tablets. Great, solid screen that is very responsive. Really my only gripe is a gripe about ALL tablets is that they are finger print magnets. I was given a stylus that I thought I would never use, but I gotta admit that I love the thing. Since I use it so much it sort of solved the finger print issue.

Performance

Meh, can’t comment on this until I get the replacement unit. It started off pretty snappy and just fell apart. Graphic intensive games were nothing to it. No lag at all. My bigger problems were the simple things which is kind of odd. I do love the option of low consumption, balanced, and performance. You can change between them quickly and there is a definite difference in battery life (and performance). I don’t need 5 cores to do most…

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