Asus Eee Pad Transformer (16GB, Wi-Fi)

Pros: In landscape 1280 pixels wide is good enough to see the real Web. Flash works. Google Talk does video chat to everything. Goes well with my Android phone - buy an app or book once and use on both. Well made. Micro SDHC. All day battery. HDMI out.

Cons: It's hard to use the thing while everybody's trying to fight me for it or ask me about it. My children steal it.

Summary: "Asus eee Pad Transformer" is an unfortunate name. I just call mine a Transformer.

I agree with all the other reviewers here: this thing is amazing. I use the iPad 1 & 2 at work, but waited for this one as it more perfectly fits what I want from a tablet. I tried the Acer Iconia Tab as well, which is quite similar and very good also. The Transformer's well made of quality materials. I really like the textured back.

Android Honeycomb 3.1. The update from 3.0 came very quick, which was a good sign. The OS is solid and snappy. Though to be fair Apple's done a more thoroughly amazing job with iOS, this Android OS is very good. I'm watching a three year old operate it right now, and he's not having any trouble.

It came with a good selection of apps and no shovelware that I noticed. The integrated bookshelf and media apps work with a lot of different kinds of content. The bookshelf is really neat because it lets me organize all by books from various sources (Google Books, Kindle, PDFs, Project Gutenberg and so on) in ways that make sense to me. Like always there were a few Android apps that wouldn't run or were substandard. In both the Android and App Store markets there's a lot of app spam going on. For everything I can think of to do with this thing, there is a good app to do that and it's usually not too hard to find. Apps are often free, but even the pay apps don't cost very much. Only a few very old apps don't scale up to the size of the display. If you don't like the browser, you can get another one, but I like it. Integrated voice input for everything is really neat and works pretty good.

Widescreen is just better for movies, and I've watched more movies on this thing in the three weeks I had it than I had seen in the prior year. The screen colors are just gorgeous. The ability to connect it to an HDTV and watch movies in 1080p is very nice. It's not usable in broad daylight of course. Knowing it's made with Gorilla glass is comforting when I hand it to the kids.

To me, expandable storage with SD or SDHC is simply mandatory. There's just no better way to get large volumes of data into the thing. The optional keyboard even has a full sized SD card slot, which will make handling images from my camera much easier when I buy that option.

The cameras are fine for what they do. No tablet is going to approach my Nikon. There is an interesting stop-motion feature of the video record that might make claymation fun.

The RDP features will let you control a PC, and do all the PC things with it. Citrix was quick and easy to set up and use. No doubt somebody will think of renting cloud desktops by the hour in the next few minutes.

Battery life is incredible. With just the tablet, reading books I'll get over 19 hours. Likewise browsing the Web. I think the 10 hour spec is for running heavy duty apps and watching high def video or streaming video. The thing just goes and goes.

Some have an issue with the lack of 3G/4G wireless. I don't. I see no reason to pay for a different data plan for every device when I can just wifi hotspot my phone in that rare instance when I don't have wifi.

And then there's the price. Under $400 is just an incredible price for this much technology. At the moment there just isn't a better tablet available for less money. I believe Asus knocked it out of the park with this one. Just outstanding.