Gallo Summer Red meets the Asus Eee Pad Transformer
Simon Woods – www.simonwoods.com
Wine first. Sorry Gallo, but your Summer Red (£6.99 Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, Tesco) didn’t do it for me. The winemaker seems to have been a little heavy-handed and extracted too much flavour, and this, coupled with the quite ripe berry fruit and touch of the medicinal/boiled sweet, makes for the sort of wine whose gawky bits – tannin, sweetness, slightly artificial acidity – stand out when you chill it. Would rather have your Merlot Rosé…
Now onto the Asus Eee Pad Transformer. OK, so it probably isn’t intended for producing semi-serious videos – fine for Skype and online chats, but as you saw in the clip above, it’s no competition for a bridge camera, or a phone with a half-decent camera. Over the course of this film, the sound and the video from the Eee Pad went out of sync, with the sound playing faster than on the other two devices and the pics playing slower (after the initial look at the performance of the three different cameras, I reverted to the sound from the Fuji).
The raw format of the video is .3gp, which imported rather shakily into Sony Vegas Movie Studio. You can edit video on the Eee Pad using the Movie Studio program that’s included with Android (nothing to do with Vegas), and then save the output as an .mp4 file. I tried this. The program is OK – you can add transitions, insert various effects, transitions and captions – but the Vegas didn’t like the mp4 file, so I just worked with the 3gp file, which my PC wasn’t too keen on. I’ve uploaded a minute of the mp4 file here and as you can see, it’s of higher quality than the 3gp version. However, I had to shove it on a SD card and upload it to YouTube from my PC, as when I tried on the YouTube app on the Eee Pad, I kept getting the message ‘The application My Uploads (process com.google.android.apps.uploader) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again.’ (It wouldn’t work loading through the browser either)
So am I unhappy with the Eee Pad? Not at all. It may not score for grunty work – writing and video editing mostly – but I’m using it far more than I imagined for stuff like planning, mind mapping, watching videos, reading books, checking train and film times and more. I’m probably connecting the keyboard 1/3 of the time, and using it as a tablet for the rest. Regarding this, removing the soft cover in order to connect the keyboard isn’t ideal, while lack of connectivity on the road remains an issue, but as I’ve been at home most of the last month, this hasn’t surfaced too much recently. So yes, despite the bad showing on the video test, I think I’m a fan (click here and here for previous reviews). Finally (again) if you’ve arrived here from a non-wine site and want to know what I think of matters grapey, have a read of this…
And do leave comments, or questions you have about the Eee Pad – will try to answer them as best I can.
Guardian