I’d been looking at a new laptop (I have a nice work laptop but I prefer to have a private one as well) to replace an older 12” Dell that I’ve got. After waffling on it a while, I gave up and got an Asus EEE Transformer tablet. 

This thing is slick! It actually seems faster than the Dell which is most likely attributed to its Android Honeycomb OS and the resultant lightweight system overhead. It’s billed as a midrange tablet, but pushes into the iPad 2 price range with one excellent accessory: its special magical keyboard dock. The accessory is $150 and attaches a keyboard, but said keyboard also has built in a nice backup battery. The battery recharges the tablet instead of just being a second battery, which is a good way to go. It also lets it close up and become a little netbook. It’s quite slick.

Anyway, having lived with a tablet for a few days now, I can see that I was right about a lot of the potential for such a device in an RPG. I’ve already loaded a few of the PDF-format rulebooks onto it and they’re handy for easy reading. A few early character sheet programs are out there, albiet pay ones and not for any games I’d be running, yet. There’s a big downside so far in that spreadsheet programs can’t handle macros on these things, apparently. The two excel charsheet generators I’ve got that use that style won’t run properly. 

Nevertheless, the thing has been useful all around. Frankly I should have skipped the Barnes and Noble Nook I got a few months back and gone for this, or something like it.