Well, this ought to be different. And ironic. For well over two years, I've kept an outline in my Notion about the ongoing retro trend that seems to be, well, everywhere. As someone who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, I’ve never really understood this ongoing fascination with pixel art games, grainy pseudo-VHS video effects, polaroid cameras and similar throwbacks although I am quite partial to synth-wave music. This outline originally never led to a fully-fledged blog post, and in the two years since I started making my notes for that post, so many other things came up that I was only able to finish it two months ago.
Here's where things start to take a bit of a turn. A few months ago, while gathering together images for a blog post outlining the differences between Android and iOS, I got out my old Asus EeePad Slider for a few shots, and just out of sheer curiosity, I decided to plug it in to see if it still charges. Turns out it does, and what’s more, it turned on instantly. More importantly, I found out over the next few days that the battery can still hold a charge, which is impressive for a device that I bought in 2012 and that was last used in 2017. With these positive surprises, and running into a few creative roadblocks with the other blog drafts I’m currently working on, an idea started to bubble up in my brain. What if I gave the old EeePad Slider a spin to see how well it holds up over a decade after its release? And could I type out a draft for the resulting blog post on the device? Maybe even add some music and pictures from my main machine? Welp, I guess I’m doing retro reviews now as well.
 |
| While the Asus EeePad Slider very much looks like a product of its time, I still like the look. |
Let’s get the obvious thing out of the way first: This is NOT a device suitable for everyday use anymore. It runs on Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich, can’t access the Play Store anymore, at least not when you have two factor authentication enabled like me, there are no software updates available anymore, and even the default weather app can’t get updates anymore. The default browser is equally unusable, being incompatible with most modern web standards. Forget about things like getting 2FA working on this thing. I tried manually downloading Opera, but couldn´t get that installed either. For better or worse, the EeePad Slider is very much a product of its time.
And yet, I’m surprised at how much this concept still works, even twelve years after I bought this machine. Granted, the device is heavy, coming in at nearly a kilogram. The display, while getting plenty bright, is comparatively low-res. And don’t get me started about the bezels. You could nearly land an airplane on those things. But despite all of that, the tablet still looks stunning. The chocolate brown and silver back with the aluminium cheatline separating the two, the mesh grille at the bottom covering the speakers, all of this still looks classy today. Also, can we talk about the ports? Because the EeePad sure has a lot of them. In addition to the headphone jack, something I dearly miss on modern devices, it also sports a mini-HDMI port, a microSD slot, and a full-size USB-A port, all built in, not bad for a time when Apple-inspired minimalism was already beginning to make itself felt. The tablet also sports a 5 megapixel main camera as well as a 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera, which I don’t recall ever using. More surprisingly, the battery an still hold a charge, even after years of storage and complete depletion. Even after nearly four hours of use, I’m still at 62% battery, despite the fact that the screen brightness is cranked up to maximum.
 |
| Even twelve years after I first unboxed it, I still think that this two-tone colour scheme just works! |
 |
| The metal elements, such as the support for the screen, really accentuate the two-tone look. |
The standout feature of the device however, the one that made me smash that Buy button on Amazon back in early 2012, is hidden underneath the display. To access it, you simply lift up the back of the display, and a spring mechanism slides it up to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. This was as unheard of back then as it is now. Even in the early 2000s, 2-in-1 devices tended to favour detachable keyboards and indeed, the EeePad Slider’s sibling, the EeePad Transformer, went down that route as well. I wasn’t a fan of that approach even back then, as I just prefer the ease of having everything I need in one device. And even now, as my daily driver is a 5th Generation iPad Air and I’ve tried my hands at Microsoft’s Surface line of devices, the all-in-one approach definitely has its advantages.
 |
| As cool as the device looks, that keyboard is nowhere near as comfortable to use as modern ones. |
Not that everything is sunshine and roses, mind you. The chocolate brown keyboard looks great, the key travel is nice and you have everything you need. But it’s small. The key size has been reduced in order to squeeze into the relatively compact size of the tablet, which plays hell with your muscle memory. In addition, the keyboard has been pushed right to the lower edge of the EeePad, depriving users of the convenience of a palm rest and making typing much more awkward than it should be. It’s by no means awful, I wrote all of my blog posts between March 2012 and September 2013 on the EeePad Slider, as well as a lot of email correspondence. It just goes to show that as neat as 2-in-1 devices can be, you`re bound to face some compromise to make it work.
 |
| I was honestly surprised at how bright the screen got on this twelve year old device. Working in daylight was no issue at all for me! |
As well as the hardware still holds up, it’s on the software side that this device really shows its age. I mentioned earlier that the EeePad Slider still runs on Android 4.0.3 "Ice Cream Sandwich". Well, that version of Android was released in October 2011, and as a result, the entire interface is a true reflection of that early 2010s design language. Skeuomorphism is everywhere, to a much higher degree than I remember, and the entire interface feels far less polished than what you get nowadays, even on budget devices. That being said, the EeePad Slider still comes with all the essentials you need on 2-in-1 device like that. It packs the usual email client, media player, calendar and browser apps, as well as a whole host of custom apps and widgets from ASUS. I’m not generally a fan of this, but I have to say, a lot of the ones included here actually worked extremely well for me, and I wish some of them were available on my iPad.
 |
| These widgets might be over a decade old at this point, but I'll be honest with you, I wish my iPad had them instead of the monolithic blocks that Apple seems to prefer. |
 |
| Some of these widgets were pretty useful though. I remember using Asus' MyZine widget, which pulled together all kinds of data, a lot back in the day. |
 |
| Android 4.0.3 really shows its age in the app launcher. |
 |
| Am I the only one who really loved this cover-flow look that media players had in the early 2010s? |
And then there`s Polaris, the office suite that Asus included, and the software I’ve been using to write this review. I mean, can it get anymore stereotypically 2010s? Dark mode enforced by default, comically oversized icons, skeuomorphism for days, the whole thing is just one giant time capsule. Oh, and don’t expect things like Autosave to work, you have to hit that save button yourself if you don’t want to lose your work. I was still firmly ensconced in the anti-Microsoft camp when I got this device, so the likes of OpenOffice or LibreOffice were my daily drivers outside of work, not least because my previous daily driver had been a Linux netbook. Even back then however, the interface just seemed so antiquated to me. On the other hand, it was a full office suite, available on my tablet, which wasn’t something I took for granted.
 |
| Polaris Office may look positively archaic by today's standards, but having a full office suite on a tablet was a big deal for me in 2012. |
 |
| Saving files locally was still a big thing when I got this device, online storage for consumers wouldn't arrive until a few years later. |
All in all however, I remember the software being pretty good for what it was at the time. The media player did its thing well, I especially loved the cover flow view, something that should definitely make a comeback. Let’s not talk about the speakers though. They were terrible then and haven’t gotten better since. The email, calendar and contacts apps were equally solid, and Google had even included a dedicated Gmail app, back when Gmail was actually user-friendly. I actually remember playing quite a lot of games on the EeePad Slider, as the Google Play Store held, and as far as I can tell still holds, one of my all-time favourite games, OpenTTD. I do remember the device becoming ever more sluggish as time wore on however, so that by time that the summer of 2013 rolled around, I was ready to move on and eventually, the EeePad Slider would be replaced by an 11" MacBook Air.
 |
| As much as I love my iPad Air 5, part of me will always be nostalgic for the EeePad Slider. |
Would I go back to the EeePad Slider as an everyday device? No. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the device, both for its concept and for what it represents. I bought this device at a transitional time in my life. My time in Germany, my country of birth, was coming to an end, my nearly ten-year time with my choir had already ended, and my career had seemingly hit a dead end. The eighteen months in which the EeePad Slider was my daily driver would see take the biggest leap of my life up to that point, accompanying me through my move to Cork and through my first year at Apple, a company that I could have never dreamed to work for. But just as my life was marked by transition, so was the EeePad Slider. It would never get any software updates beyond Android 4.0.3, and its limited hardware would see it left behind by more and more apps. Asus shut down the servers for its services on the Slider in 2017, support for Android 4 ended in December 2018 and Google Play Services were finally terminated in 2019. I`ll keep the EeePad Slider around, as a last-ditch device, a memory of that heady period in my life and potentially as a distraction-free writing machine. Its days as a daily driver however, are sadly over.
Comments
Post a Comment