Las Vegas – Asus unleashed a total of 4 tablets at CES 2011, but only one had a permanently attached keyboard. The Eee Pad Slider has a 10-inch touchscreen that slides up to reveal a physical QWERTY keyboard. Armed with nVidia's Tegra 2 and Android 2.2 (it'll have Honeycomb when Google allows OEMs to release it), the Slider has the foundation for a good tablet experience, and we spent some time with it to see if that was the case.
The one I looked at was an early unit, as paint was still chipping off from various spots. But the Android 2.2 software load was production-ready. Granted, it's supposed to run Google's Honeycomb OS, but so far only Motorola has a working demo of it. When it ships, the Slider will have its own custom Asus skin called, "My Way", which accesses a number of themes pertaining to music (think Apple's cover flow), photo slideshows, and video streaming. The video streaming app is pretty neat, as it can connect to any DLNA device in your living room, which, with a good WiFi connection, can stream video content in 1080p. It took about 2 two seconds for each Asus proprietary app to load, longer than I expected from a tablet of this caliber. All the apps beyond Asus's customizations launched and worked flawlessly.
What makes the Slider different from all its other slates is the built-in keyboard. You lift up the screen from its top a quarter of the way and it'll slide on its own until you see the QWERTY keyboard. It's about half the size of a standard one, and it'll feel cramped after typing on it for a while. Sliding the screen back down took more effort, but I'll just chalk it up to pre-production hardware. In slate mode, the Slider is remarkably thin despite its keyboard attachment, thinner than the Samsung Sliding PC 7 Series, which use a similar sliding screen implementation.
The 1,280-by-800 resolution is high up there for a 10-inch screen. It has both a front facing camera (1.2 Megapixel) and a rear-facing one (5 Megapixel) with Flash LED. Bluetooth and 802.11n WiFi are your built-in wireless connections, and it'll have 3G at some point later on (Asus declined to comment on which carriers the Slider will support). There's a full size USB 2.0 port, as well a mini one. A Micro SD slot and mini HDMI port are available as well. Local storage will come in the form of a 16GB or 32GB SSD drive.
As with most Android tablets, the preferred platform seems to be Nvidia's Tegra 2. It streams 1080p video, is gaming friendly, and Honeycomb-ready, so what's not to like? Memory configurations go up to 1GB and the 25WH battery promises up to 6 hours of battery life.
When it ships, which is sometime in May, the Asus Eee Pad Slider will run from $499 to $799. Hopefully by then, it'll have Google's Honeycomb and the purported 3G wireless radio.
