ASUS Eee Transformer Review

I caved in and bought a tablet about a month ago.  I always like to do a little bit of research first to see which are the best bang for the buck, as well as allowing a little bit of my underdog loving ego.  This article isn't about the OS or Apps, but it does talk about the experience of using the hardware and operating system.  My version does not have 3G, but for me this isnt an issue at all, I  simply use a wireless hotspot on my phone and connect via that.

By the way, before I get into it, most of the Tegra 2 based Tablets seem very similar in specs although there have been a few blog posts(see table footer) which score the Xoom to be better in a number of areas.

                

	Apple iPad 2	ASUS Eee Pad Transformer	ASUS Eee Pad Transformer 32G with Dock	Motorola Xoom WiFi	Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
SoC	Apple A5 (Dual ARM Cortex A9 @ 1GHz)	NVIDIA Tegra 2 (Dual ARM Cortex A9 @ 1GHz)	NVIDIA Tegra 2 (Dual ARM Cortex A9 @ 1GHz)	NVIDIA Tegra 2 (Dual ARM Cortex A9 @ 1GHz)	NVIDIA Tegra 2 (Dual ARM Cortex A9 @ 1GHz)
GPU	PowerVR SGX 543MP2	NVIDIA GeForce	NVIDIA GeForce	NVIDIA GeForce	NVIDIA GeForce
RAM	512MB	1GB	1GB	1GB	1GB
Display	1024 x 768 IPS	1280 x 800 IPS	1280 x 800 IPS	1280 x 800	1280 x 800 PLS
NAND	16GB	16GB	32GB	32GB	16GB 32/64 available
Dimensions	241.2mm x 185.7mm x 8.8mm	271mm x 175mm x 12.95mm	271mm x 175mm x 12.95mm +Dock	249.1mm x 167.8mm x 12.9mm	256.6 x 172.9 x 8.6mm
USB	No	No	2 x USB 2.0	Micro USB (2.0)
HDMI	No	Mini HDMI	See Main Unit	Yes
Input	Touch Screen	Touch Screen	QWERTY keyboard Touch Pad	Touch Screen	Touch Screen
Card Reader	No	Micro SD	1 x Card Reader (MMC/SD/SDHC)	Micro USB
Battery Life	~5h Movies	>6 Movies*	16h minimal >13Movies*	>7Movies*
Charge Time			~3h*	~2.5h*
Weight	601g	695g	695g + 640g Dock	730g	565g
Price	$499	$399	$695	$599	$499

** Xoom and Asus Data from http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1562/1/

So you have the main specs above, now the main usability issues I had:

• Speaker is very low power
• Docking - not smooth, sometimes loses connection to the keyboard and has to be reattached
• Power button - it's sometimes slow to react
• Charger is propriety - cant charge from USB
• Faster/Lower Power Tegra 3(Kal-El) version coming out soon?

Other reviews of ASUS Eee Transformer, The user reviews say pretty much the same:
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/tablets/asus-eee-pad-transformer-954145/review

OneNote Copy Text From An Image

I can't believe I didn't see this before.

If you insert a picture into OneNote using a file, scanner, screen clipper etc then you can read (OCR) the text from the image, using the Right Click-> Copy Text from Picture command.

Of course this would have been a lot more impressive if I was still scanning things in from magazines or letters, but I'm not complaining!

You probably cant see how exciting I found this, if I was writing a txt message I would have probably typed :

OMGYG2BK

Oh my God, you got to be kidding

SharePoint 2010 Balsamiq Wireframes

Working as a SharePoint Consultant you don't always have benefit of a dedicated UX consultant.  If you are working using an agile method such as scrum you may find that you quickly need to sketch wireframes with the product owner or team to communicate the requirements and user stories.

Wireframes are a low-fi representation of a webpage. They need to be medium detail design which gives enough information the end user to relate to and the designer to understand while still allowing his creative skills to be put to good use.

I love the use of white boards when in workshops but sometimes you don't have the benefit of these so software is another option.  I found that the Visio SharePoint Templates, although accomplished, didn't give the same impact as using lo-fi Balsamiq versions.

Balsamiq has a number of build in components which allow for quick development of UX concepts, I've created a few more elements created for a project I worked on recently:

• Standard Homepage / Master
• SharePoint 2010 Ribbon 
• Views / Data Grids
• Taxonomy Browser
• Visio Services Process Viewer
• Standard Search
• FAST Search
• Task Dialog
• Social Tagging
• Social Notes
• Presence Indicator
• Presence Popup
• Tag Could

The current version of Wireframes for Sharepoint 2010 in PDF
Here are the Balsamiq Source Files 

SharePoint 2010 Alert Me Missing from Ribbon

If you are missing the Alert button from the Ribbon then you may have not configured the email functionality of the installation.