Welcome to a Laptop Battery specialist of the Asus Laptop Battery
No one has yet come up with the perfect Windows 8 laptop-tablet hybrid, despite dozens of attempts between late last year and now. The powerful Asus Transformer Book, however, comes pretty close, adding several premium features that are on my wish list.
This is, at first glance, an ultrabook-thin 13-inch laptop, similar to Asus' Zenbook line, and with a desirable 1,920x1,080-pixel screen resolution. The CPU, RAM, and other components are all packed inside the lid of the system, which pops off when you activate a small latch near the hinge, leaving you with a 13-inch touch-screen Windows 8 tablet.
We've certainly seen that setup many times before in systems such as the HP Envy X2. So, what makes the Transformer Book, at a very expensive $1,499, so different from these other systems? First, it's the premium components. The CPU is a high-end (although low-voltage) Intel Core i7. The Envy X2 or Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2 for example have only very low-power Intel Atom CPUs. Then there's the high-resolution touch screen -- we're seeing more 1,920x1,080-pixel displays this year than ever before, but it's still not the laptop standard.
Beyond that, the Transformer Book has a 128GB solid-state drive in its tablet half, augmented by a full 500GB hard drive in the keyboard base. That lets you store big movie and game files in the larger spinning hard drive, but applications, photos, and other things you'll need in tablet mode can stay on a faster SSD. This type of hybrid storage is more popular than ever, but rarely implemented in such a way that the two drives can live separately like this. Asus also doubles up on the battery such as Asus a31-s6 Battery , Asus a32-s6 Battery , Asus 90-NEA1B2000 Battery , Asus S6F Battery , Asus A33-S6 Battery , Asus s6fm Battery , Asus AL23-901 battery , Asus AP23-901 Battery , Asus Eee PC 1000 Battery , Asus Eee PC 1000HA Battery , Asus Eee PC 901 Battery , Asus Eee PC 904HD Battery , with one battery in the screen and a second one in the base.
In basic look and feel, the Transformer Book is very reminiscent of Asus' other ultrabook-style laptops, particularly the Zenbook series. Which is to say, it also looks a lot like a MacBook Air, although cast in a darker hue. As a long-time manufacturer of laptops for other brands as well as itself, Asus has a keen sense of design, at least in terms of the physical silhouette.
Because most of the components are packed behind the screen, the system is very top-heavy, and can potentially tip over backward if you tap the screen too hard. It's not going to rock backward every time you use it, but it feels unbalanced. Even worse, with two hard drives and two batteries, the tablet-plus-keyboard weighs a whopping 5.3 pounds, without the AC adapter -- that's more than a clunky old pre-Air MacBook, and the entire package feels too heavy to carry around on a regular basis. If you've ever commuted with a 5-pound laptop, you'll know what I mean.
The big selling point of the Transformer Book is that it, well, transforms. Used by itself, the tablet screen is excellent, and I appreciate the extra real estate the higher resolution gives you in the traditional desktop view of Windows 8. In the tile-based Windows 8 (which really was easier to refer to when Microsoft called it "Metro"), the onscreen icons autoscale, so you're less likely to notice one resolution over another.
The keyboard base has a flat-topped, island-style keyboard that works reasonably well, but like many Asus keyboards has a lot of flex in the middle, even under moderate typing. The large buttonless clickpad below the keyboard is a generous size for a 13-inch laptop. Single-finger input works works well enough for pointing and clicking, but multitouch is frustrating, another issue I've found on numerous Asus laptops. Two-finger scroll gestures worked with some browsers and modes, but not others, and the entire pad has a floating feel, making it easy to over- or undershoot your target.