Asus EeePad Slider First Look: Full Review Coming Soon

With its clip-on keyboard/battery/connections dock, the EeePad Transformer already gave us a taste of Asus' hybrid approach to the touchscreen tablet. Now the EeePad Slider takes the concept one step further, with a slide-out keyboard fusing the portable computer and touchscreen tablet into one handy device.

There's nothing particularly innovative about the Slider's tech specs, as it uses a 1 GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 (T250) dual-core processor and has 1 GB of RAM. It has a USB 2.0 (Host) port, a microSD card slot, a mini HDMI output, a 3.5 mm jack for headphones and a proprietary connection for charging the Slider or hooking it up to a computer. Similarly, the Slider runs on version 3.2 of Android Honeycomb.
 

From the front, the Slider looks a fair bit like the EeePad Transformer. However, the back of the device has a white soft-touch finish with imitation aluminium detail, a 5-Megapixel camera and a couple of little feet to keep the Slider stable when using it with the keyboard out.
 

Unlike the Transformer's keyboard dock, the slide-out keyboard doesn't have an extra battery built-in. This makes the Slider slimmer and more compact than the Transformer. It's also a fair bit lighter, weighing 946 g compared with 1.3 kg for the EeePad Transformer with keyboard dock.
 

The slide-out design is obviously very practical, but the mechanism Asus has developed for switching from tablet to keyboard mode isn't the most intuitive. Instinctively, we wanted to push the screen upwards with our thumbs (like a giant slider phone), but we soon found out that you actually have to grip the top of the screen in one hand, hold the tablet firmly with the other and pull the screen upwards to start the sliding motion. 

It's something you inevitably get used to, but it could certainly have been more sleek. We were, however, pleased to see that Asus supplies a magnetic cover with the EeePad Slider.

The 32 GB Slider should start cropping up in shops within the next few days.

Stay tuned for our full review coming soon!