Marco Angelo D'Souza
Asus recently came up with its Transformer Series – the Asus Transformer Book Flip, which is a full-sized 15.6-inch laptop, where the screen folds over completely to take on the form of a tablet.
Priced at Rs 47,999, this laptop doubles up as a touchscreen device. Its touchscreen has a hinge design that enables the screen to be set at any angle between zero to 360 degrees. Hence, it can be used as a laptop, a responsive tablet, or anything in between.
We got a hands-on experience of this gadget after using it.
The Book Flip is powered by Intel Core i3 processor running at 1.7GHz, 4GB of RAM and a 1TB Seagate 5,400 RPM SATA III hard disk drive. The gadget weighs at 2.6 kilograms, which is quite heavy.
The touchscreen with a screen resolution of 1366x768 pixels was smooth to use, responsive and immediate. The touchscreen feature goes well with the pre-installed Windows 8.1—especially when using the tiles on the Windows Start screen.
The screen has a bit poor vertical viewing angle. While this isn’t generally an issue when used as a laptop but using it as tablet in portrait orientation can be a little uneasy. The poor viewing angle results in visible variation in colour and brightness between your left and right eye.
On the connectivity front, all ports are on the sides which is a good thing for accessibility. There is an HDMI 1.4 output for driving an external display or TV, a high-speed USB 3.0 port for use with a compatible external hard drive or the like, 2 USB 2.0 ports, an SD/SDHC reader for your digital camera cards, a Gigabit Ethernet port and a DVD writer drive.
The device was used extensively for the daily computing activities such as, using web activities, e-mails, watching movies, playing games and other stuff sailed through easily. It is a decent option if you wish to use it for regular computing purposes.
The Asus Transformer Book Flip is a decent laptop-tablet combo, but the pricing at nearly Rs 50K is something to think about when there are other good options available in the market.
