ASUS eee pad Transformer Prime
Seeing as I seem to perpetually be evolving my gear, I figured I’d give this tablet a go as my primary machine for a while.
Unfortunately, they’re so hard to come by that only my keyboard dock has managed to arrive so far, but once the tablet itself actually shows up and I’ve had a chance to put my plan below into practice for a while, I’ll discuss said plan’s success or failure at a later date.
At any rate, for the past 6 months or so my primary machine has been a 15″ i7 MBP, which while great, is the same basic configuration in terms of software and usage model I’ve been using for the past 5 or so years (combination of IDE, terminal software, OS etc). I decided to try moving more, if not all of what I do into hosted/cloud services. Including IDE and software and web application deployment. Literally as much as a possibly can of my day to day work flow.
The fact that the prime has a keyboard dock which includes a touchpad is what prompted me to try this little experiment. I attempted to do something similar with my iPad 2, but having to physically break my hand placement to reach up and touch a screen just didn’t work. The iOS interfaces require too much cursor placement, and keyboards simply aren’t usable as a sole input device in iOS. Additionally, the various web browsers available for iOS proved nonfunctional or too buggy for the hosted services in question.
I’m hopeful that the prime will fare better, as I’d love to ditch the heavy laptop in favor of a tablet and keyboard/pad dock like the prime. A ~$650 tablet/keyboard combo is significantly more appealing than a $999+ underpowered macbook air.
I suspect I may end up getting an 11″ air though and using it in the hosted model I described above rather than attempt to use it with my current development model, which in the past failed spectacularly with a 2010 air due to how underpowered it was.
Time to solve the issues ASUS and start shipping the prime en masse already, my preorder has been in place long enough, I’d hate to cancel it and accept defeat and just straight to an i7 11″ air…
