ASUS Transformer Book T100 Review: Redefining the Entry-Level Windows Notebook
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 18, 2013 12:00 AM ESTDisplay
The T100 features a 10.1-inch 1366 x 768 IPS display, which makes for awesome viewing angles and an experience that will put most entry level notebooks to shame. Compared to what we’re used to seeing from Windows notebooks, ASUS did a tremendous job with the panel selection given the price of the T100.
Brightness, black levels and contrast are all reasonable but nothing extraordinary. Max brightness in particular is limited to only 228 nits. That’s more than bright enough for indoor use, but outdoors or in direct sunlight you may wish for a brighter panel. Black levels are quite good, which helps deliver great contrast ratio. As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, the gap between display panel and cover glass is large enough that reflections can be an issue - a problem that is worsened by the fact that the panel can’t get super bright.
Whether or not any of this is a problem to you really depends on perspective. If we’re limiting our comparison to traditional entry level PC notebooks then ASUS has really redefined what it means to be a $349 PC. If you broaden the comparison to Android tablets and even Chromebooks, the comparison grows more difficult.
Color accuracy isn’t great on the T100. Once again, compared to what you’d traditionally get from a Wintel PC at this price point it’s amazing. Compared to the Chromebook 11 we recently reviewed at $279 however, the T100 needs some work.
It’s definitely not a bad display, it just doesn’t live up to the expectations of some other low cost devices we’ve seen lately (e.g. 2013 Nexus 7, Chromebook 11). The charts below show you the stark difference between what we're expecting to display and what the T100 actually displays:
There's a green hue to all of the white/grays, and the other colors are just off. Users definitely benefit from the viewing angles of IPS but the T100 needs calibration.
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ssiu - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
Intel's listed price: Z3740 $32, Z3770 $37.Like I said in an earlier thread, why are companies sacrificing ~20% performance to save $5? I'll glaqdly pay $10 more for the higher performance of Z3770. :mad:
boeush - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
It's probably less about the price/margins, than about TDP and battery life/size/cost/weight.FwFred - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
The Z3770 is probably similar in battery life/size/cost/weight. I'm guessing price points was the key. It would have been nice to offer the 64GB version with the upgraded CPU.DanNeely - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
Intel listed them both as 2W SDP parts; so battery life probably isn't going to differ much between them (and not just because the screen is probably drawing more power than that).tential - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
This margin thing is killing me as well man. They're doing a TON to make 5 extra dollars. I know that 5 dollars over 1000s of units may turn into $100k, but this is why Apple does better than these OEMs sometimes.Apple knows their software in and out and makes sure the laptop they produce can run it in all scenarios the AVERAGE user will use it in.
These OEMs make a laptop to hit a pricepoint, and make their profit margin and don't care about performance at all. It's why people will get a bad perception of their company.
"I bought Asus laptop and it was cheap, but it also sucked!!!!"
Releasing a product that barely does it may seem good for short term but hurts longterm perception of the company to the average consumer who doesn't care about hardware and just expects everything they purchase to work.
double88 - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Asus laptops are generally pretty solid. Much more so than other OEMs. Apple's products are more polished, yes, but Asus is probably second best.theduckofdeath - Saturday, October 19, 2013 - link
The new SDP rating is a bit of a mess. It's lower than TDP ratings as it takes an average including light usage like web browsing. This surely means that a processor with a higher burst performance will get a much lower rating. I guess that the high-end iteration of the new Atom simply was found to draw too much power under load for them to be happy with it.timon_comment - Saturday, October 19, 2013 - link
Waiting a look in Bay Trail M + SATA, PleaseNote, Atom Bay Trail T is still no support SATA and PCIe.
in Windows x86 OS I dislike the eMMC storage system, it is an execrable design, the heavyweight Windows x86 OS is fully unlike in the lightweight Android OS.
Windows needs SATA and PCIe, but Atom Bay Trail T is still no support SATA and PCIe.
Intel actually wanted in Android to compete with ARM processor, does not really want Bay Trail T to help Windows tablet to compete market, because the x86 processor is almost no another competitor! Now is merely Intel wanted to control the Android market!
zeo - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
The older v4.41 specification eMMC drives are pretty slow but they're starting to improve... Newer models can now take advantage of the newer v4.5 specification that doubles the max bandwidth and introduces RAM based cache memory to significantly boost eMMC performance.They'll still be a lot slower than a modern SSD but at least not slower than a HDD anymore...
And the next bump in performance will be out early next year with the next version update for eMMC that allows for a little better than SATA II performance finally...
Mind, eMMC is a single chip design and SSDs are multiple chips... So it's harder to get performance from a single chip but they're slowly getting there...
MagickMan - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
I would have gladly paid $370 for the same package with a Z3770. Too bad, I guess I'll wait for the next one and see what it's like.