ASUS Transformer Book TX300 Pro Reviews

The Asus Transformer Book TX300 is a great laptop, with a great trick up its sleeve. While it's unlikely to give the iPad a run for its money as a tablet, it's still a useful device with real-world benefits, and, most importantly, this doesn't hamper what is a fantastic Ultrabook. If you're looking for a great hybrid but don't want to give up the comfort of a laptop, we may have just found a compromise that works.

Overall, we were impressed with the specs and performance of the Transformer Book. The design is a compromise, though: As a tablet, its 2.1 pounds are far less unwieldy than the three-pound-plus weights of non-detachables like the Yoga 13 and XPS 12. But once you attach the keyboard, the notebook is a pound or more heavier than many competitors, something you'll definitely notice when you're on the road. If we weren't enamored with the weight of the fully assembled Transformer Book, we did love the utility of having a powerful 13.3-inch tablet. The large, high-res screen made reading a pleasure, and we enjoyed being able to use apps like Photoshop and Sony Vegas Movie Studio without performance restrictions (at least when plugged in). While smaller tablets are more suitable for tasks like reading on the train or carrying in a purse, we can definitely see the utility of the Asus' tablet half in the home, office, or anywhere you can prop it on a lap or desktop. Perhaps our biggest issue with the Transformer Book is timing, with the system arriving just as more battery-friendly "Haswell" systems are starting to reach the market. While the combined configuration's runtime is impressive, the tablet alone doesn't last as long as a tablet should. Here's hoping Asus has a successor up its sleeve.

The Asus Transformer Book TX300C looks great, combining a well-designed laptop with a high-performance tablet, but it has some quirks that can't be ignored.

The Asus Transformer Book highlights the difficulty of bridging the gap between laptop and tablet. Despite having excellent components, and added features that make a lot of sense, such as dual SSD/HDD storage, the final product is still not as seamlessly easy to use as it should be, partly because of quirks of Windows 8, and partly because of the top-heavy design and suboptimal touch pad. That said, this is still one of the best hybrid attempts to date, and if you're looking for a powerful full-time laptop and part-time tablet, and don't mind paying more than you would for a MacBook Air, you'll probably join me in applauding Asus for packing a high-end CPU and high-res screen into a sharp-looking aluminum body.

If you were willing to wait this long for the Transformer Book to go on sale, you may as well wait a few more months for a possible Haswell refresh: it would bring longer battery life and stronger graphics performance too. But is it worth holding out for at all? Depends on how badly you want a 13-inch standalone tablet. Though the dockable-tablet form factor makes sense for 11-inch systems, it becomes more niche-y when you expand the screen size to 13 inches. After all, tablets that big can be cumbersome to use, even when they're as thin and relatively light as the Transformer Book is. And this one doesn't have a Wacom digitizer, which rules out some scenarios where the slate form factor might come in handy. Meanwhile, convertible laptops like the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13 and Dell XPS 12 weigh less in total, but still manage to offer roomy keyboards, hands-free tablet modes, slightly longer battery life and similarly fast (or faster) performance. Before you dismiss it, though, there are still some practical reasons to choose the Transformer Book over those other machines. Number one is that spare battery. Almost no convertible Ultrabooks allow you to use two batteries at once. And unfortunately, many current hybrids (the Surface, Acer Iconia W700) don't have a second battery in the keyboard. Likewise, it's extremely uncommon to find a spare hard drive inside the keyboard dock, and most Ultrabooks tend to top out at 256GB of solid-state storage. So if more space and extended battery life are important, the Transformer Book could be a good option -- even if you rarely end up using it as a tablet. Just take our advice and wait on Haswell.