I'm close to deciding on a trip to Southeast Asia in October (to finish what was cut short last year), and if I go, I plan to carry a tablet computer with me (in lieu of multiple guidebooks, plus ability to surf, email, and skype).

I have my eyes on either the Asus Eee Transformer or the Acer Iconia A500.  Pray tell, does anyone here own either and would you recommend it?

Did you sell the ipad? I don't have either of those.

As much as I like Acer features their product support sucks. It took almost 2 weeks for them to approve an RMA on a machine which had a bad motherboard. I gave them multimeter readings that showed the power supply had failed too. Finally about the 12th tech , apologized and authorized. When the machine came back it was fine but they told me I couldn't purchase an extended warranty because of my states laws. Hogwash. Note that their CEO was recently ousted. So now they are said to shift to tablets. But really their 14 inch notebooks are great in terms of battery life, weight, and even have DVD burners. I hate HP even more and Lenovo is very shady in policies. I'd try out their forums and product support before buying either. Where to Ben? My daughter's starting at Nanjing Univesity and we may visit at Christmas.

Edited by Meander on 07/26/2011 18:27:34 MDT.

Hi John:

Yes I did. I love the iPad, but didn't like Apple's iTune sync mechanism. Rushed to sell the thing just as soon as I got back from my trip (to beat the iPad 2 intro date) -- and got most of my money back.

Anybody owns either of the two tablets above?

I'm a free software developer, I would never buy anything for Apple or Windows. Having said so, I must inform you that there are no worthy tablets with Android yet. Right now you only have two options:

1) buy an Ipad if you don't have ethicaL issues.
2) Wait at least six months.

Anyway Asus is ussualy better at the same pricepoint, and Acer's hardware is normally buggy.

I purchased an A500 last week for $300. So far I actually really like it.

I have rooted mine, intalled clockword recovery, and got Netflix working through a hack :)

The 3.1 update for the A500 fixed a big power consumption issue it had.