Hands on with the Asus Eee Tablet: an e-reader on steroids

At Asus’ pre-Computex press event today RCR got some time alone with the genuinely innovative Eee Tablet, and honestly, we’re really quite impressed.
Asus has made a truly in-between product – it’s not quite “Pad” as we’ve come to know them; instead it’s more like an e-reader on steroids.
Asus pushes its new product as an interactive e-reader for students and business folk. It uses a stylus and glass capacitive touch screen with an ultra-high 2450dpi resolution to get its accuracy. On the back there’s a webcam so students can take photos of the whiteboard or lecture notes and add annotations on the device too, although the 600MHz Marvell ARM chip is a little slow to focus and shoot – it takes about 5-10 seconds to initialise and shoot a decent photo so you’ll not be taking quick snapshots.

It’s all in black and white too. Asus still uses a TFT screen so it’s about 10x faster with a 0.1s response for page turning, but it doesn’t use a backlight. The firm says that reading on a backlit screen for long periods causes eyestrain, and we’d agree, like any e-reader it has to be treated like a book and used in ample ambient light.
It’s less than 500g and the metal/glass construction feels great to hold. It’s actually probably a little small for student use, especially if you’re scrawling equations everywhere, and the webcam is really very poor for taking accurate images or even large images because even though it might be “2MP” the actual CCD is the size of a pin-head. Still the writing is accurate and it has plenty of useful in-built programs for keeping all your notes, organising them and syncing them with your PC.
Even with a 600MHz ARM chip it still feels a bit sluggish on the graphics front though, but that might be because of the bigger than smartphone 1024×768 resolution packed into the 8” device. On the plus side there is a 10 hour battery however.
At just $199-299 dollars depending on the model, it’s easily competitive with other e-readers and far more versatile. If Asus can get the hook up with the right software and books, then it could be onto a winner.