ASUS Eee Pad Slider Review

Battery Life

The Slider's battery life just isn't as good as the Transformer. There's the obvious lack of a second battery holding the Slider back, but even compared to the Transformer sans dock I found the Slider wouldn't last as long on a single charge. The situation worsens when you slide out the keyboard. The Slider has to actively poll the keyboard for input, which in turn reduces battery life.

In our video playback test the Slider and Transformer were basically equal, however in our general use test (web browsing + email + music playback) the Slider only lasted 8.2 hours compared to the Transformer's 9.3. Obviously there are many variables that could be at work here. The big news is the impact simply having the keyboard open has on battery life. The Slider still lasts longer than most high-powered notebooks, but in the ARM-based tablet world it's below average.

Software & Performance

The Slider is running Android 3.2 putting its performance on-par with the Transformer. Back when Android 3.2 first came out we noticed a dramatic increase in GLBenchmark 2.0 performance scores, likely due to a GPU driver optimization. The move to GLBenchmark 2.1 appears to have reset that performance back to Android 3.1 levels, perhaps indicating the use of an app detect driver optimization in Android 3.2. The rest of the performance figures are pretty standard for a Honeycomb tablet. The 1GHz Tegra 2 performs no differently in the Slider than it does in the Transformer.