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Touchscreen Keyboard
I felt it would be inappropriate to not mention the touchscreen keyboards for those people that will forget about the keyboard dock as soon as the retail packaging gets ripped open. By default Asus has included their own keyboard as well as Android 4.0’s default.
Most of the time I used the default Android keyboard, this was mainly because the Asus keyboard is extremely squashed in landscape orientation due to the additional row of numbers.
The Asus keyboard is best for use in portrait orientation however, as it takes up noticeably more space on the screen. While the stock keyboard in the same orientation is better for thumb typing, it really depends on your tablet typing technique.
Overall I would have to give the nod to Android’s default keyboard as it has a better predictive and auto correct system. For picture referencing, the Android keyboard is in grey while the Asus keyboard is mostly white.
As a last piece of information, I gave the word per minute test I mentioned in the keyboard section another go, this time with the default Android keyboard and got a score of 30 WPM, with a much higher ratio of wrongly spelt words compared to the physical keyboards.
Other Applications
Asus has bundled in quite a few of their own and their partners applications, most of which are pretty much useless, at least to me personally. Such bloat includes two magazine applications.
There are some useful ones though, including Polaris Office. It has the ability to create Word, Excel and PowerPoint circa 2003 files. Plus I was able to create the above PowerPoint slide in just a few minutes. I actually used the word processor in combination with Dropbox to write a fair chunk of this review but later reverted to Google Docs as for some reason I often lost a few lines after making modifications soon after saving.
Moving on there is SuperNote, an extensive note taking application that can handle drawings, annotations and all that good stuff. Personally I would still use Evernote or handy dandy Dropbox however.
Then comes Asus’ suite of applications which includes an e-book reader, a DLNA media player, Asus WebStorage, @vibe music streamer and a file manager.
Also included are applications to backup and lock applications. Amazon Kindle and Nvidia’s TegraZone are present to get your tablet experience off to a good start.
