Asus EeePad 101TC & EeePad EP121 Hands on

Hands on with Asus Eee Pad 101TC

While still a touchscreen tablet, the Eee Pad 101TC is in some respects a whole different kettle of fish to its bigger brother. It's not just the 10 inches of glass that follows in the iPad's footsteps, but also the metal sleeve around the edge now seems somewhat iPhone 4-esq (or is the iPhone 4, Eee Pad 101TC-esq?). Either way, this has become an aesthetically acceptable style and the textured backside also looks good and adds grip, however in the early sample on show the quality of manufacture still needs some tweaking around the edges.


As for the LED backlit display itself, we think it's a touch smaller than the iPad because of the thickness if the black bars surrounding it, however it does have a front-facing camera and its own 'home' button at the bottom.

As for the hardware inside, we know it's Nvidia Tegra powered - we assume and heard it was Tegra 2 - however we're waiting on confirmation from Asus on this. Apparently it has 340MB of memory to play with (we assume some is dedicated to graphics) and it was running on Microsoft's recently announced Windows Embedded Compact 7, Build 1344, compiled on May 28 2010. Asus' own software shell then runs over the top of this giving a smartphone style smooth and flowing, but currently limited functional interface.


This included several widgets for tasks such as checking the weather forecast, time and email, plus a dock for common sections like music, video and photos, rather than specific applications. This screen can be swiped across to reveal a page full of sections, rather than programs we'd actually want to use. It's less direct shortcut, more Asus taking the old-school product approach of trying to cover every facet. Honestly, I thought we were beyond that.


The Eee Pad 101TC includes Bluetooh and a USB port, but we don't know much else at this time unfortunately. Others have reported a competitive MSRP of $399-499 but it's not expected to ship until Q1 next year.