Asus Transformer Book TX300 review: A high-end hybrid bursting with features

No one has yet come up with the perfect Windows 8 laptop-tablet hybrid, despite dozens of attempts between late last year and now. The powerful Asus Transformer Book, however, comes pretty close, adding several premium features that are on my wish list.

7.9

Asus Transformer Book TX300

The Good

The <b>Asus Transformer Book TX300</b> is a rare hybrid with a Core i7 CPU, a high-res screen, and smart dual hard drives -- there's an SSD in the tablet half, and a larger hard drive in the keyboard base.

The Bad

The system is awkwardly top-heavy, and you feel as if you're fighting the touch pad at every turn.

The Bottom Line

Asus adds a lot of what I've been looking for in a hybrid to the Transformer Book, but no one has yet really nailed the perfect laptop/tablet combo.

This is, at first glance, an ultrabook-thin 13-inch laptop, similar to Asus' Zenbook line, and with a desirable 1,920x1,080-pixel screen resolution. The CPU, RAM, and other components are all packed inside the lid of the system, which pops off when you activate a small latch near the hinge, leaving you with a 13-inch touch-screen Windows 8 tablet.

We've certainly seen that setup many times before in systems such as the HP Envy X2. So, what makes the Transformer Book, at a very expensive $1,499, so different from these other systems? First, it's the premium components. The CPU is a high-end (although low-voltage) Intel Core i7. The Envy X2 or Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2 for example have only very low-power Intel Atom CPUs. Then there's the high-resolution touch screen -- we're seeing more 1,920x1,080-pixel displays this year than ever before, but it's still not the laptop standard.

Beyond that, the Transformer Book has a 128GB solid-state drive in its tablet half, augmented by a full 500GB hard drive in the keyboard base. That lets you store big movie and game files in the larger spinning hard drive, but applications, photos, and other things you'll need in tablet mode can stay on a faster SSD. This type of hybrid storage is more popular than ever, but rarely implemented in such a way that the two drives can live separately like this. Asus also doubles up on the battery, with one battery in the screen and a second one in the base.

But, if the Asus Transformer Book is packed full of good ideas, the execution can fall frustratingly short at times. Part of the fault lies with Windows 8 -- despite being built for tablet use, Microsoft's latest operating system is still terrible at switching among tablet, laptop, landscape, and portrait modes, with long pauses, blacked-out screens, and other occasional weirdness. It's a problem that has plagued all Windows 8 hybrids, so while I don't blame Asus specifically for this, it makes the system harder to use.

I do, however blame Asus for some of the physical quirks of the system. In true Asus fashion, the touch pad is a mess, registering multitouch gestures sometimes, but not others. The keyboard has another common Asus feature -- too much flex while typing, especially in the middle. And finally, no one has yet nailed the perfect hybrid tablet hinge. Most, like this one, rely on clunky physical release buttons, which make removing the screen a two-hand job, while reattaching it requires trial and error as you feel around for the exact right spot.

If it sounds like I'm being tough on the Transformer Book, that's because it has so many of the other features I want from a laptop-tablet hybrid, making these shortcomings all the more painful. This is still one of the best hybrid executions I've seen, and I certainly hope we get more Core i7, SSD/HDD, high-resolution systems such as this in the future.