ASUS Transformer Book T100 Review: Redefining the Entry-Level Windows Notebook
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 18, 2013 12:00 AM ESTBattery Life
The Transformer Book T100 features an integrated 31Wh battery. As the keyboard dock doesn’t include an extra battery, that’s all you get. The good news is that Intel’s Atom Z3740 is built on the company’s first 22nm SoC process and it’s paired with LPDDR3. At least on the silicon front, the T100 should be fairly power efficient. Granted there are still the PMIC, display, WiFi and other components to worry about, but here’s to hoping ASUS did a reasonable job there as well.
Unfortunately ASUS delivered our T100 review sample less than 48 hours ago and I’ve been using it non-stop since then. I think I technically broke embargo by using it at a press event but it’s the only way I’d get enough time with the thing under my belt to feel comfortable writing about it. The bad news is that I only had enough time to provide a battery life teaser. I’m still running more data but for now all I’ve got is our WiFi web browsing test.
The T100’s results are presented with the keyboard dock attached and with the display calibrated to 200 nits:
Battery life looks decent at just over 8.5 hours on a single charge. In practice I had no complaints about battery life while using the device. It feels more like a tablet in that regard and less like a notebook, which is a good thing. Once again we’re seeing ASUS redefining what we’ve come to expect from an entry level notebook PC here. Even compared to Chromebooks we see the T100 do extremely well. I’m curious to get a better feel for how Bay Trail performs in the battery life department, which I’ll be doing over the coming days. So far the results look good but not quite stellar if you compare it to traditional Android/iOS tablets. I am curious to see how BT running Android would turn out.
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ssiu - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
Intel's listed price: Z3740 $32, Z3770 $37.Like I said in an earlier thread, why are companies sacrificing ~20% performance to save $5? I'll glaqdly pay $10 more for the higher performance of Z3770. :mad:
boeush - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
It's probably less about the price/margins, than about TDP and battery life/size/cost/weight.FwFred - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
The Z3770 is probably similar in battery life/size/cost/weight. I'm guessing price points was the key. It would have been nice to offer the 64GB version with the upgraded CPU.DanNeely - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
Intel listed them both as 2W SDP parts; so battery life probably isn't going to differ much between them (and not just because the screen is probably drawing more power than that).tential - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
This margin thing is killing me as well man. They're doing a TON to make 5 extra dollars. I know that 5 dollars over 1000s of units may turn into $100k, but this is why Apple does better than these OEMs sometimes.Apple knows their software in and out and makes sure the laptop they produce can run it in all scenarios the AVERAGE user will use it in.
These OEMs make a laptop to hit a pricepoint, and make their profit margin and don't care about performance at all. It's why people will get a bad perception of their company.
"I bought Asus laptop and it was cheap, but it also sucked!!!!"
Releasing a product that barely does it may seem good for short term but hurts longterm perception of the company to the average consumer who doesn't care about hardware and just expects everything they purchase to work.
double88 - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Asus laptops are generally pretty solid. Much more so than other OEMs. Apple's products are more polished, yes, but Asus is probably second best.theduckofdeath - Saturday, October 19, 2013 - link
The new SDP rating is a bit of a mess. It's lower than TDP ratings as it takes an average including light usage like web browsing. This surely means that a processor with a higher burst performance will get a much lower rating. I guess that the high-end iteration of the new Atom simply was found to draw too much power under load for them to be happy with it.timon_comment - Saturday, October 19, 2013 - link
Waiting a look in Bay Trail M + SATA, PleaseNote, Atom Bay Trail T is still no support SATA and PCIe.
in Windows x86 OS I dislike the eMMC storage system, it is an execrable design, the heavyweight Windows x86 OS is fully unlike in the lightweight Android OS.
Windows needs SATA and PCIe, but Atom Bay Trail T is still no support SATA and PCIe.
Intel actually wanted in Android to compete with ARM processor, does not really want Bay Trail T to help Windows tablet to compete market, because the x86 processor is almost no another competitor! Now is merely Intel wanted to control the Android market!
zeo - Sunday, October 27, 2013 - link
The older v4.41 specification eMMC drives are pretty slow but they're starting to improve... Newer models can now take advantage of the newer v4.5 specification that doubles the max bandwidth and introduces RAM based cache memory to significantly boost eMMC performance.They'll still be a lot slower than a modern SSD but at least not slower than a HDD anymore...
And the next bump in performance will be out early next year with the next version update for eMMC that allows for a little better than SATA II performance finally...
Mind, eMMC is a single chip design and SSDs are multiple chips... So it's harder to get performance from a single chip but they're slowly getting there...
MagickMan - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
I would have gladly paid $370 for the same package with a Z3770. Too bad, I guess I'll wait for the next one and see what it's like.