My new toy

Well. It's been a while, hasn't it? Sorry about that.
It turns out that neither a netbook, nor an iPhone are particularly conducive to my mood when it comes to blogging. 
Enter my new toy... It's neither pure tablet, nor netbook, but a combination of the two.

My admiration for a little Taiwanese company called Asus is no secret.  They are the company that made netbooks so popular five years ago with the original EeePC. In fact when Apple was talking about the iPad 2, Asus already had me intrigued with a prototype that they were showing off that was basically two iPads joined along the longer edge...
That ultimately turned into the EeePad Transformer, EeePad Slate and EeePad Slider early last year. Check out their microsite here.

The Slate is still a completely different monster to all the rest and remains something that I will covet until I win the lottery.  The Slate is a true artists tablet - like a Wacom Cintiq but not tethered to a desktop and one day I will buy one just to enjoy the pure thrill of drawing (with a pressure sensitive pen) directly onto my screen.

For now though, I have treated my self to the second generation of the EeePad Transformer: With the unwieldy name of the Asus EeePad Transformer Prime.
It is a beautiful combination of netbook/laptop and tablet, running on Google's Android platform rather than Apple's iOS or Windows.
Imagine a laptop where you can detach the screen and use it as a tablet and you're on your way to understanding the Prime.

The detachable keyboard, while also providing a level of screen protection and making typing far easier than using an inscreen keyboard has a real innovation: it provides a second battery... In fact whenever the tablet is docked to the keyboard it starts to draw power from the keyboard battery first, recharging itself at the same time!

I received my Prime on Tuesday.  Since then, I have surfed, tweeted (briefly - I'm still trying to find a Twitter client for Android that I like), used Facebook (UGH!- but that's Facebook's fault) watched hours of streaming video, played games, read Comics (thank you Comixology for allowing me to sync my titles between my iPhone and my Prime!) paid bills and watched movie trailers.  It is now Saturday morning. The keyboard has been completely drained and the tablet battery is down to 28%, so in effect I only have 14% charge left... SINCE TUESDAY!!!!  Compare that to my iPhone which generally has to be plugged in every night and I am VERY impressed with my new purchase.

All I need for it now is a Photoshop-like image editor and a MicroSD card to expand the storage capacity (already ordered) and I will be sorted.

Unfortunately, I also no longer have any excuse not to get back into blogging, so you're probably going to see a bit more from me in the near future...

Take care.

Tim