ASUS Transformer Pad TF701T review: Full throttle

Organizer

The Asus Transformer Pad has the full version of the Polaris Office 5.0 suite for viewing and editing documents.

Polaris Office has support for viewing document files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF, including the Office 2007 versions).

Polaris Office

Reading documents is quite comfortable and panning is blazing fast. You can edit a wide variety of settings and documents, and there's also cloud storage integration (Dropbox, Box and Google Drive).

The calendar has three different types of view - daily, weekly and monthly. The lower section of the screen is reserved for a list of upcoming events. Adding a new event is quick and easy, and you can also set an alarm to act as a reminder.

The calendar

The Calendar also pulls info about upcoming events from your Facebook account. Facebook events appear just like regular calendar entries but you can't edit them on the phone - they are read-only.

There is also a calculator aboard. It is nicely touch-optimized - the buttons are really big and easy to hit. You can enable advanced functions (trigonometry, logarithms) in either portrait or landscape mode.

The alarm clock app supports multiple alarms, each with its own start and repeat time. The Alarms app can also work as a desk clock - you have a big toggle for the brightness, as well as weather info and shortcuts to gallery slideshow and the music player. There's no world clock, stopwatch or timer though.

The Alarm clock is versatile and beautiful

The Weather app utilizes the 10.1" perfectly and shows the current weather condition on the left third of the display. The forecast for the next six days are displayed on the right of the screen.

The Weather app is embracing the tablet's display

Finally, the Recorder app lets you create voice memos that you can save and listen to later.

You are in good hands with Google Maps

The Asus Transformer Pad comes with a GPS receiver, which took about a minute and a half to get satellite lock upon a cold start. You can enable the A-GPS to get near instantaneous locks. Alternatively, network positioning will do if you only need a rough idea of your location.

Google Maps is a standard part of the Android package and we've covered it many times before. It offers voice-guided navigation in certain countries and falls back to a list of instructions elsewhere.

Google Maps comes preloaded

3D buildings are shown for some of the bigger cities and you can use two-finger camera tilt and rotate to get a better view of the area.

Google Maps uses vector maps, which are very data efficient. The latest version has an easy to use interface for caching maps - you just choose "Make available offline" from the menu and pan/zoom around until the desired area is in view (there's an indicator showing how much storage the cache of that area will take). You can later view cached areas and delete ones you no longer need.

Note that there's a limit to the size of the area you can cache - you can't just make all of Europe available offline, not even a whole country. We managed to fit New York and parts of the surroundings before Maps told us the area is too big. Another things is, there's no address search in the cached maps and you can only cache map data in supported regions of the world.

StreetView in action

You can plan routes, search for nearby POI and go into the always cool Street View. The app will reroute you if you get off course, even without a data connection.

Google Play Store

The Asus Transformer Pad runs Jelly Bean, so it has no problems accessing all of the latest apps. The Store is organized in a few scrollable tabs - categories, featured, top paid, top free, top grossing, top new paid, top new free and trending. The in-app section is untouched though and it's very informative - a description, latest changes, number of downloads and comments with rating. There are usually several screenshots of the app in action, and oftentimes a demo video as well.

The Google Play Store

There are all kinds of apps in the Google Play Store and the most important ones are covered (file managers, navigation apps, document readers etc.), so if you wish you could do something more with your phone, odds are it's in the app store.