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The Asus Transformer Pad TF300T is supplied with the latest version of Android (4.0.3). Asus haven’t gone overboard on customisations like some manufacturers but they have enhanced the standard Ice Cream Sandwich interface in some areas.
There are a few applications preinstalled on the Transformer Pad but we’d hardly describe these as bloatware as they do a good job of enhancing the user experience. For example, Polaris Office is very useful for those who want to read, amend or create Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents on the move. This is made especially useful by the laptop dock.
Asus also preinstall a very useful app called SuperNote which will prove very useful for some users. This lets the user create ‘notebooks’ and ‘paintbooks’ which can be used to note by hand and type or create basic drawings and diagrams. The note taking aspect of this software lets you write anywhere and any size on the screen and then scales it down to fit between the lines on the page. This part of the app is ideal for use with a capacitive stylus.
We also find a few further apps preinstalled on the tablet which include ‘My Library’ which automatically indexes all the e-books on the tablet including those downloaded from Amazon Kindle. There is also an app called ‘MyNet’ for media streaming and another called ‘MyCloud’ which lets you access Asus’ cloud computing services.
We feel a little let down by the internet browser interface as the scrolling is a little unresponsive. There seems to be a split second lag between making a gesture and the tablet responding with the appropriate action. Scrolling is made much easier and smoother by using the scrolling bar which appears on the right hand side of the page.
Another disappointing aspect of the software interface is the on screen keyboard which is much less easy to use than those on other tablets we’ve tested in the past. The keys are quite small which makes them difficult to hit with accurately when trying to type with some vigour.
We would prefer to see Asus moving the top row of numbers to a different keyboard screen as this would let them enlarge the letter keys without making the keyboard take up more space. This isn’t a massive issue for the Transformer Pad due to the physical keyboard on the dock but there are going to be times when you don’t have the dock so it’s still important.
