ASUS' Transformer Book T100: Atom Z3740 Inside, Available October 18th at $349
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 11, 2013 8:16 PM EST
Earlier today, ASUS CEO Jerry Shen teased their first Bay Trail tablet: the T100. Today at ASUS' IDF press conference we got some more details on the tablet. The official name is the Transformer Book T100 and it's a 10.1-inch Windows 8.1 tablet. The IPS display features a 1366x768 resolution. Normally I'd complain about that, but the T100 starts at $349 for a 32GB model.
Internally, ASUS settled on the Atom Z3740, a quad-core Bay Trail SKU clocked lower than the one we previewed earlier today. The max non-turbo frequency on the Z3740 is 1.33GHz, with a max turbo of 1.86GHz. Since this isn't a D-SKU, ASUS settled on a dual-channel (2x64-bit) LPDDR3 memory interface.
Much like the Bay Trail FFRD we tested, the T100 is equipped with 2GB of LPDDR3. NAND storage options include 32GB or 64GB eMMC. There's also a single microSD card reader.
Other IO includes a micro USB port for charging (and/or external USB devices), a micro HDMI output and a headphone/mic jack. There's keyboard dock included (!!) that adds a USB 3.0 port. ASUS claims they used the Thinkpad and MacBook keyboards as the benchmarks to evaluate the T100 against.
The T100 ships with an integrated 31Wh battery. ASUS promises up to 11 hours of battery life thanks to the Bay Trail silicon inside. The tablet measures 10.4" x 6.7" x 0.41" (0.93" thick with the dock) and weighs 550g/1.2 lbs (2.4 lbs with the dock).
On the software side, in addition to Windows 8.1 you get a pre-installed copy of Office 2013.
The T100 is extremely interesting as it's truly a reimagining of the netbooks of 5 years ago. It's thinner, lighter and much faster.
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rituraj - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
Don't know jack about coding. Sorry..But about the digitizer, I don't think it will be available. Asus has never included digitizer support in any of their products if I recall correctly. If you really want a digitizer, surface pro 2 will be for you. I think a digitizer is one of the most underrated features in a tablet. I am never going to touch a tablet without a digitizer. I hope somebody makes a bay trail based convertible with a pen, with battery-dock, with a hard drive in the dock with sd card (not micro sd) support. I don't think I am asking too much, am I? I am looking at you SAMSUNG. Others don't care about poor people..
Drumsticks - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
Depends on what you're coding on and in. An IDE is much more resource heavy than text editor and a command line. You could probably do some small work with sublime text and a command line, but no big projects.SrRaven - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
Yeah I am considering the Surface 2, but I'm having some problems with the amount it will cost (I'm a poor student so 350$ for this Tablet PC or 800 $ for a Surface 2).But yes, a Digitizer is amazing for some things.
nerd1 - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
ASUS had some lineups with proper wacom pen (EP121 and some other tablets), so I expect Dell, Lenovo, ASUS and Samsung will soon release baytrail tablet with proper wacom digitizers.cbf - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
Don't do it.2Gb of RAM will be too little for most modern IDEs. It may run, but it will be very slow.
As others have said, eMMC secondary store is second rate. Actually, not even that. Vastly inferior performance compared to modern SSDs, and potentially limited lifetime due to lower grade flash, inferior wear balancing algorithms, etc.
Finally, you really don't want to be programming on 10" 1366 x 768 screen. Try to get something at least 13" and at least 1440 x 900.
Yes, unfortunately, getting all that will be a fair amount more expensive than a T100.
SrRaven - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
Yeah. I would love the Chromebook Hardware but with a proper OS.I like the Chromebook build quality, but sadly even when you dual boot into a "normal" Linux, its not that good for coding.
bryanb - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
You do know that Linus Torvalds uses a Pixel when he travels, right? Or when, like recently, his SSD in his desktop crashes.SrRaven - Friday, September 13, 2013 - link
Yes, but the Pixel is on a whole different level price wise.mwarner1 - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
THIS is the product I have been waiting for - at least in a 64GB format. It amazes me how long it has taken to arrive, but hopefully this will spark off something similar to the Netbook revolution started by the Asus Eee 701 (which I owned & loved tinkering with)I bought the Asus VivoTab Smart ME400c earlier in the year as a compromise device, but I just couldn't get used to the lack of physical keyboard on a Windows device so had to get rid of it.
Looking forward to it - just maybe this will give other manufacturers, releasing decent specced devices but with awful TN screens, a serious kick in the right direction.
bryanb - Thursday, September 12, 2013 - link
I wish it ran a better OS, like android or chrome. Silly how as soon as they switch the CPU from Arm to Intel they screw up the already successful OS choice of the transformers that preceded it.