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Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700

Editor's rating (1-5): rating starrating starrating starrating starrating star
Carrier: N/A, WiFi-only
Manufacturer: Asus
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What's hot: HD IPS display is wonderful, slim, light, fast and versatile with optional keyboard dock.

What's not: Dock and headphone ports not the best design.

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Reviewed July 27, 2012 by , Editor in Chief (twitter: @lisagade)

There's nothing like anticipation and low inventory to hype a product. We saw that with the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime early this year, and now its successor, the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700 is poised to start another feeding frenzy. While the Prime has its problems, the Infinity TF700 is everything the Prime should have been, and then some. Wireless radios work perfectly, ports and controls are more robust and the 1920 x 1200 HD display is one of the best we've seen on a mobile product. The rear f/2.2 camera with BSI sensor and 5 element lens likewise is the best tablet camera on the market. Granted, that might not say much given the state of tablet cameras, but the TF700 really does take excellent photos and 1080p video that far surpass the mediocre Transformer Prime and Asus Transformer Pad TF300 camera.

Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700

Specs

The tablet runs on the newer and faster 1.6GHz NVidia Tegra 3 T33 quad core CPU with 1 gig DDR3 RAM and 32 or 64 gigs of storage. It feels fast and is fast running Android OS 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and we can't wait to see how much snappier it gets with Android 4.4.1 Jelly Bean and its touch of Project Butter (Asus has said the TF700 will get Jelly Bean, and knowing them, it will be sooner rather than later). The tablet has Wifi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 and a GPS (that works). It has a front 2 megapixel video chat camera and a rear 8 megapixel camera. Ports include micro HDMI, the usual Asus proprietary charging/docking/USB port, USB host via the optional keyboard dock or Asus USB host adapter and a 3.5mm audio jack. The Infinity has a full HD Super IPS + capacitive display and a 25Wh Lithium Ion battery. The 32 gig sells for $499 and the 64 sells for $599. It's available in amethyst gray and champagne silver, similar to the Transformer Prime.

Display

Like the new iPad with Retina display, colors are lush and detail is extreme. Images look much more real and text is superbly sharp. Unlike the iPad, the Asus Transformer Pad TF700 has one of the brightest mobile displays available. The Super IPS + display reaches over 600 nits of brightness. That certainly helps outdoor viewability, though the glossy Gorilla Glass 2 clad front reflects plenty in sunlight.

Is the display night and day different from tablets like the Transformer Prime? Not at first glance. But you'll notice the Infinity TF700 looks more appealing and sharper, yet not as harsh as the Prime whose contrast and coolness amplify sharpness while making things look a bit hard compared to the Infinity. If you own a Prime and are happy with it, there's likely no reason to upgrade. But if this is your first tablet or you're upgrading from an older 1280 x 800 Android tablet with a non-IPS display, you'll definitely notice the improvement. The Infinity's display is sharper and brighter than the HD panel on the Acer Iconia Tab A700.

Design and Ergonomics

The Infinity TF700 has an aluminum back with a swirl pattern and it's available in amethyst gray and champagne gold colors. It's one of the more attractive tablets on the market, and it's also very thin at 0.39" and light at 1.32 pounds. There's a plastic strip along the back upper edge to improve wireless reception (metal interferes with reception). We've enjoyed good WiFi performance and a tenacious GPS that locks onto satellites indoors even with WiFi off.

Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700

As with all Transformers, you can get an optional keyboard dock that turns the tablet into a clamshell notebook style. The dock has a keyboard, trackpad, USB port and an additional battery. Asus states that the TF700 and TF201 Prime docks aren't interchangeable, but we've no problems using our Prime TF201 dock with the Infinity. The new dock has a "TF700-dock" part number on the box, but the dock is labeled TF201-dock. Go figure.

We had complaints with the Prime's port and control design. In order to make the skinny tablet seem even slimmer, Asus used an aggressive taper that's more gentle on the Infinity TF700, and the same is true of the Transformer Pad TF300. That makes it easier to operate the buttons without your finger sliding down the taper, and ports can be a bit more robust. The dock connector is a bit sturdier though still delicate enough that it ships with a rubber plug protecting it, and the headphone jack still leaves some of the headphone plug exposed (be careful not to short it with anything metal or you might hear feedback in your ears when using headphones). Unlike the Prime, the TF300 and TF700 don't ship with rubber plugs in the two holes on the bottom edge for the optional dock's latches. The holes aren't pretty but apparently users didn't take the rubber plugs out of the Prime and thus couldn't get it into the dock (really?!).

Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700

With the optional keyboard dock.

Thanks to its light 1.32 pound weight, the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700 isn't tiring to hold, though we still think that a tablet can be too thin to hold comfortably. The Infinity TF700, like the Prime and TF300, is so skinny that there's little to hold onto. The straight sides on the Toshiba Excite 10 are actually more ergonomic.

The single speaker grille fires from the rear just where you'll likely put your hand when holding it in landscape mode. Volume and fullness are a disappointment and can't complete with the rich and loud Acer Iconia Tab A700 and Toshiba Excite 10. If the room is quiet, you can use the speakers to watch a movie, but if there's ambient noise you'll want to use headphones or portable speakers.

 

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Performance

Asus is once again at the top when it comes to processing speed. The quad core (plus fifth low power companion core) NVidia Tegra T33 CPU is the newer and slightly faster version of the T30 used on other quad core tablets and smartphones. It's clocked at 1.6GHz vs. 1.3Ghz on other tablets including the Transformer Prime and it is indeed slightly faster on benchmarks. The tablet feels very fast too, in fact it's just as fast as my quad core Nexus 7 tablet running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, an OS that has serious speed optimizations. One exception is web browsing, where Transformer tablets fall behind in page load times and scrolling/pinch zooming responsiveness. The Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, currently the tablet with the fastest CPU on the market, a quad core 1.4GHz Exynos with Malio 400 graphics, is much more responsive when using the stock web browser.

I/O storage speeds have never been top notch on Asus tablets, but in the two weeks I've been using this as my main tablet, I haven't been bothered with as many of those occasional hiccups and slowdowns as with some prior Asus models. I'd love to see Asus banish slowdowns once and for all, but I suspect it's a component selection issue rather than software. Asus released a firmware update on July 27, 2012 that improves I/O speeds for those who are having slowdowns when using the tablet while downloading and installing large apps and files.

The TF700 has 1 gig of DDR3 RAM vs. the DDR2 RAM used on most other tablets and it's available with either 32 or 64 gigs of storage. You can augment that with microSD cards (or full size SD cards if you own the dock). We tested cards up to 32 gigs capacity and they worked fine. You can also use USB mass storage devices (USB flash drives and hard drives) that are formatted FAT32 or NTFS via Asus' small USB adapter that plugs into the sync/charge/dock port or the full size USB port on the optional keyboard dock.

As with other Transformer Android tablets, you can use power/speed settings to conserve battery power or run the tablet as fast as possible. The default Balanced setting works for us, offering nearly the same speed as Performance mode. Still, it's nice to have this geeky feature that's normally found on laptops rather than Android tablets.

Benchmarks

  Quadrant GLBenchmark 2.1Egypt Offscreen AnTuTu Sunspider JavaScript Test
Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700 4915 74 fps 12,229 1903
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 5349   12,777 1206
Toshiba Excite 10 4143 63 fps 11,056 1935
Acer Iconia Tab A700 3646 58 fps 10,536 1958
Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime 3801 61 fps 9846 1814
Asus Transformer Pad TF300 3425 69 fps 9559 2257

Wireless

The Transformer Infinity has single band WiFi 802.11b/g/n. Asus really worked hard to improve wireless performance compared to the Prime, and the Infinity has very good WiFi performance in terms of reception and speed. In fact, it managed -5db better signal than some of our laptops, and notebooks generally have better reception than tablets thanks to higher powered radios and longer antennas.

The tablet has a GPS and digital compass that work well. Even with WiFi turned off, our TF700 found 8 satellites in the first floor of a two story home 15 feet from the nearest window, and it got a location fix with 8m accuracy. Nice. It took 20 seconds to get that indoor cold fix with WiFi off, and it took only a few seconds with a warm start and with WiFi on. Outdoor performance when driving was very good.

The TF700 has Bluetooth 3.0 + HS for wireless headphones, speakers and Bluetooth keyboards among other things. It worked reliably in our tests, though we did note occasional audio track delays when watching streaming videos (a common problem with single chip WiFi/Bluetooth equipped smartphones and tablets). Video didn't stutter and audio didn't sputter as a consolation.

Camera

Tablet cameras generally stink. The HTC Jetstream was an exception, but the rest didn't take photos or video that motivated us to wave a 10" camera around. The Infinity TF700 changes all that: it takes photos that are so good I don't care if I look like a dork waving it around. Images are crisp, colorful and lifelike. The camera has some trouble with extreme outdoor contrast, but it's much improved over the Prime and to be fair, many high end camera phones have problems with this. The camera has touch to focus, and autofocus times are good.

The 8 megapixel rear camera has a flash, BSI sensor and a fast f/2.2 five element lens. It shoots very sharp and smooth 1080p video at 30 fps that's good enough to capture special moments and share them with friends on-screen or over HDMI or dLNA to an HD TV.

Battery Life

The Transformer Pad Infinity TF700 has a 25Wh Lithium Ion polymer battery that's sealed inside. Asus claims up to 10 hours use, and so far we've managed 9 on average with a mix of email, web, YouTube short clip playback and Polaris Office use. If you use the GPS heavily or game, expect shorter battery life. Video playback times are good, and we got through 3 feature length movies at 50% brightness with power to spare. The optional keyboard dock extends runtimes since it has a 19.5 Wh battery, and Asus claims 14 hours which seems on target in our tests with the TF201 dock that has a 22Wh battery. As with previous Transformer models, the battery in the dock charges the tablet and Asus includes a widget that displays both tablet and dock battery levels.

Software

The Transformer Pad Infinity TF700 ships with Android OS 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich. Asus has stated that the Infinity will get the update to 4.1 Jelly Bean, and they've been good about offering OS updates reliably and quickly so we hope it won't be too long.

Asus doesn't muck much with Android's UI, so you're getting a fairly pure experience. They do add their selection of useful applications. These are the same apps that are bundled with the Transformer Prime and TF300 and they include Polaris Office (view, edit and create MS Office compatible docs), Splashtop HD remote (remotely access your PC or Mac's desktop), an app backup utility, App Locker (prevent the kids from running specified apps), SuperNote (rich notes with text and drawing support), Zinio, Press Reader, dLNA, a decently featured but slow ePub ebook reader and Asus Cloud Storage.

Conclusion

Yes! Finally a high end Asus Android tablet that we can love. My two weeks with the Asus Transformer Infinity TF700 have been truly enjoyable. The HD Super IPS + display is simply beautiful and the tablet is very fast. It's been stable as well with none of the "wait/force close" error messages that plagued my Transformer Prime and occasionally befuddled my Transformer Pad TF300. WiFi works well as does the GPS, and the camera is surprisingly super. We continue to like Asus' bundled software that truly are value-addeds rather than bloatware, and we look forward to Jelly Bean since Asus is always quick with OS upgrades.

If you're looking for a high end HD Android tablet with a versatile dock option, fast quad core CPU, USB host and an outdoor viewable display, we recommend the Transformer Pad Infinity TF700.

Price: $499 for the 32 gig and $599 for the 64 gig model

Website: www.asus.com

Related:

Asus Transformer Pad TF300 Review

Asus Transformer Prime Review

Acer Iconia Tab A700 Review

Toshiba Excite 10 Review

 

Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700

 

 

 

Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700

 

 

Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700

 

 

Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700

 

 

Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700

 

Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700

Closed, with optional keyboard dock.

 

 

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Specs:

Display: 10.1" Super IPS + capacitive touch screen. Resolution: 1920 x 1200, supports both portrait and landscape modes.

Battery: 25Wh Lithium Ion rechargeable. Battery is not user replaceable.

Performance: 1.6GHz NVidia Tegra 3 T33 quad core CPU with 12 core GeForce graphics. 1 gig DDR3 RAM, 32 or 64 gigs storage.

Size: 10.35 x 7.12 x 0.33 inches. Weight: 1.32 pounds.

Cellular: N/A. WiFi-only in US.

Camera: 2MP front camera and 8MP rear camera with LED flash, F/2.2 lens. Can capture 1080p video.

Audio: Built in speaker, mic and 3.5mm standard stereo headphone jack.

GPS: Has GPS and digital compass.

Networking: Integrated single band WiFi 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0 + HS.

Software: Android OS 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich. Full suite of Google apps: search, voice search, Maps, Navigation, Places, Gmail, Email, web browser, Market, Gtalk with video chat, Books (Google ebook reader), Gallery, YouTube, Music, Clock, Calculator, Contacts, Calendar and Latitude. Asus and third party apps:MyNet dLNA, MyLibrary ebook reader, Polaris Office (MS Office suite), MyCloud (cloud storage and PC remote control software by Splashtop) and file manager.

Expansion and Ports: 1 SDHC microSD card slot, micro HDMI, 3.5mm audio and USB host via optional USB dongle adapter or optional keyboard dock.

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