Video: Vijay Ravindran, senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of The Washington Post, demonstrates the ASUS Android tablet.
Touchdown is a powerful e-mail application available only on Android. It can be directly compared to Outlook or Entourage. If you use iPad’s native e-mail client, you know how significant this is. Touchdown has nearly all of the sorting, search and storage features as Outlook.
The native e-mail client on the Asus is, however, comparable to the iPad but lacks a search functionality — a deal-killer for high-volume e-mail recipients. Thanks to Touchdown and the keyboard dock, I can bypass my company’s virtual private network (VPN) and increase my e-mail productivity.
Browsing
Asus’s stock browser blows Safari away because it supports Flash. More Web sites can be fully displayed, and you’re limited only by processor speed. For example, you can use Amazon’s music and video library on the Asus, and the products render well in standard definition. Firefox 4 is also available on the Asus and can be set as the default browser.
The takeaway
It has been two months since I made the switch to the Asus, and I am happy to report that I don’t regret my choice. While I continue to use a MacBook for work, and a MacMini and an iMac at home, among several Apple products, I don’t travel with a laptop or Apple product and still manage to effectively field large volumes of e-mail and edit documents.
The Transformer has allowed me to replace both my iPad and my MacBook Air without setting foot in an Apple store, and the Transformer’s unique combination of a tablet and slim keyboard dock allow it to fill two important functions — functions Apple has yet to consolidate.
The Asus Transformer is something rare. It has reduced the number of devices I use, while Apple keeps driving that number up. The iTunes single-computer requirement — a feature Apple is working to change — forced me to limit the use of my MacBook Air. The laptop stayed at home, since I feared it being lost, stolen or damaged.
Thanks to a misplaced dairy product, it met its demise anyway. If you are an Apple product user who lives with the same fear, or have trouble with the touch-screen keyboard like I do, an Android tablet or netbook might be a greater improvement than you realize.
Ravindran is senior vice president and chief digital officer for The Washington Post Company. Before joining The Post, he was chief technology officer for the start-up political technology firm Catalist and technology director for Amazon.com.
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