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The Asus Eee Pad Slider earns itself a huge tick in the performance column in one very simply way: this is the smoothest Android tablet we've seen yet.
Scrolling between Home screens is as slick as you like, the app list flashes up and away in an instant, apps load quickly, the multitasking list is smooth and stable – this is Android at its very best, for general use, without a doubt.
It still suffers from Android's common imperfections, though. When zooming or panning in the browser, it's fast and responsive, but there can be a stutter, which makes it difficult to be precise. Sometimes, particlarly in the browser, there will be a mysterious lag when typing in the URL bar, which is frustrating.
The browser is fast to load sites, certainly, but consistently lagged just behind an iPad 2 running iOS 5 in head-to-head tests (both with Flash turned on and off). Android 4.0 looks set to boost Android tablets in this area, but that's the situation as it stands.
And yes, Flash 11 is available as ever from the Android Market. And yes, browsing a page with Flash content will drastically reduce the responsiveness of the browser. In addition, many iPlayer videos had an odd black mark that appeared occasionally, while going between fullscreen and a smaller window within the browser often caused the audio to go slightly out of sync.
However, the videos did play, and play smoothly, so for those of us who can't live without Flash, performance is about as good as we can get at the moment.
Media stored on the device played impeccably. HD video in particular was absolutely brilliant, with both 1080p and 720p files playing back smoothly. The killer is the crisp, clear screen, though. It's absolutely perfect for video, and the way the screen sits up on the Slider when the screen is out makes this an ideal tablet to keep you entertained on a long journey (well, save for the battery life, as we'll explain in a moment).
That screen really is the best thing about the Eee Pad Slider. At 1280 x 800, it's nice and high resolution, with text appearing crisp and easy to read. More than that, though, colours are vibrant and hugely appealing, and the viewing angles are excellent. It's also brighter than a lot of Android tablets. It's one of the best tablet screens we've seen, to put it simply.
Of course, the keyboard is a big feature for the Eee Pad Slider, since it's pretty much its reason for existing. And the good news is that is isn't bad. The keys are fairly small, but a nice gap between them makes them easy to find without concentrating.
In fact, we found it easy to hit the right key first time over 90 per cent of the keyboard, despite its size. You will inevitably miss more keys than you would on a full-size keyboard, but no more so than other small, portable keyboards.
Most of the 10 per cent where we weren't hitting the right keys was hunting for things like Control and Alt, which are slightly displaced because of the Home, Back and Menu keys.
The only really annoying aspect was that it's ludicrously easy to hit the up arrow button instead of the right Shift key. We did it constantly throughout this review, and it gets more annoying every time.
You will, of course, come to accomodate the layout as you get used to it, but even after hours of use, we were still nudging that damn up arrow.
Still, though, we give the keyboard a thumbs up, and the angle of the screen makes the while thing reasonably comfortable to use. Any small mobile keyboard has layout foibles, so we don't begrudge them too much, even if they can be annoying.
The last big thing for tablets is battery life, and this is probably the Slider's weakest area. It's rated for eight hours, but when we tried streaming video over Wi-Fi with the screen's brightness turned all the way up, we got just under five hours out of it.
This isn't terrible, though. You can expect a good deal more battery life than that if you're just using it type documents, for example. Though it's certainly well behind what the iPad can give you, let's remember that this is more focussed on the netbook/small laptop market than the iPad, and compared to most laptops this is great battery life in a far lighter package.
And as is so often the fashion, the Eee Pad Slider features front and rear cameras. The 1.2-megapixel front camera is as good as it needs to be, picking up a decent amount of light. The angle of the screen when slid out will give the person you're chatting to a lovely view of your nostrils, but it works well enough.
The rear five-megapixel camera turned out to be surprisingly good on a sunny day, though the 720p video footage it takes was rather weak, with a huge amount of artefacting ruining any semblance of detail.
