The Transformer Transforms: More Things To Find On Your Asus Eee Pad

This post is Part 4 of a small series of five articles covering what movie fans might or might not get out of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer. Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 can be found here.


Dragging myself away from Angry Birds proved to more difficult than you might think but when I finally did, it turned out that the Transformer has a few areas of interest just as involving as flinging little round flying creatures at distinctly unimpressed pigs.

YouTube

It perhaps comes as no surprise that the Transformer comes with YouTube's app ready-installed. Asus' tablet runs on the Android Honeycomb operating system produced by Google who also own the video-sharing service. What is a surprise is that YouTube on Android comes with a nice slick interface which displays featured videos on a nice rotating wall (above) for easy viewing. It appears that Google's various departments have got their heads together and knocked up something rather nice - hardly a given in recent times. Sharing videos you've found is, as you might expect, a simple job and the searching is as responsive as it is on the main site.

Keyboard

One of the Transformer's USPs is the keyboard dock which turns the device from tablet to mini-laptop (hence the name 'Transformer', see what they did there?). The docked result (above) is still small enough to carry round and when folded looks smart and modern. The keyboard though just doesn't seem to have the same build quality as the tablet. The docking mechanism is simple, manual and a bit clunky and if you don't get it aligned exactly the tablet refuses quite adamantly to park itself. You can also click the 'lock' button into place without actually securing the keyboard meaning an embarrassing 'drop' if you pick the contraption up by its top half. That said, once docked, the keyboard is a useful tool to have when a long piece of typing is required.

Background

This might seem like an obvious one but indulge me for a second: there is a simple joy to be had in changing your wallpaper, particularly on a high-resolution tablet. Hold your finger over any image you find in the browser and the option pops up or, like me, build a store of classic film images to rotate through.

What happened Charlie?

Yes, I do like 30 Days Of Night enough to have it as a background. Shame about the lack of heads though.

Stupid Zombies

Like Angry Birds but with a man, in a vest, with a gun. And zombies. Has someone been watching Army Of Darkness by any chance? Now then, just... one... more... go...