Woot had the Asus Transformer TF300T on sale cheap recently, and I'd always been enamored of the form factor - I'd played around with Android/x86 on the EEEpc briefly, even without a touch screen, and I'm certainly one of the people stalling on getting a MacBook Air because it really should have a screen which is a detachable (retina) iPad :-) Likewise the Motorola Atrix was pretty tempting when it first came out (I got to poke at one and conclude that it wasn't quite there yet but was a good direction, it certainly wasn't enough to switch me over to AT&T at the time.) The TF300T is an interesting pile of neat features:
It has a touchpad, which is a negative as I've pointed out before - but there's a top-row key to turn it off entirely, so it doesn't end up bothering me (and yet I can turn it back if I must have it... or I can just touch the screen which I keep forgetting :-)
Oddly the Jelly Bean upgrade was more trouble than benefit: my two primary "content production" (as opposed to consuming/surfing) apps, Flickr and Tumblr, report themselves as "not compatible with your device." I'm actually writing this on the TF300T, using the website and Chrome - but I'm at home with solid network, and making use of tumblr's "save as draft" feature - and I'm still worrying about not actually having persistence or auto-save. (Still going through the exercise, of course; writing speed is certainly 100% anyway, the keyboard is Just Fine as long as I don't think about it too much :-) (Update: The Tumblr app now has tablet support, though it's still inconsistent about rotation.)
Having carried the Transformer for another week, I've taken a few more steps:
rsync for android and some scripting to keep the last 90 days of photography on the card (mostly to be able to show it off from the tablet, but that may become more)
(another Woot! - $99, great price for another monitor "just to have around", usually I use it on VGA with an old thinkpad, but it works pretty well with this - sometimes a little glitchy in "scale" mode, no problems at all in "crop" mode which just drops the bottom-of-screen Jelly Bean control bar.)It's definitely working out as "mobile typewriter" - just slightly less overhead than the GNote+bluetooth approach, at the cost of making one pocket a lot bulkier. Was also useful for getting some quick cat pictures up on Flickr after all, even without the native app - the Web UI uploader is just fine, stick the card into the keyboard (haven't tried USB-to-camera yet), select the image from /Removable/SD, add some tags and a description, done. Winter is upon us (no really, just because it was 55F two days in a row, doesn't mean, umm...) so I won't be getting as many excuses to go out "in the field" and want to immediately push wildlife shots to Flickr, but I might do a few more for practice anyhow.
Another thing the transformer is letting me experiment with is the whole idea of a "MacBook Air with a removable iPad screen" - the TF300T is a fine prototype of that, and it turns out that
I haven't tried SSH or VNC from here yet; oddly, I've kept finding plenty to do that doesn't need either of them; it's not that I don't need to do those things, but if I'm forcing myself to spend time using the transformer, I can use the time well, just a little selectively. (I really need to come up with a decent programming solution - in fact, I should try Koding again, see if it works better from here than from the CR-48 ChromeBook...)