The Transformer tablets have all enjoyed an excellent build quality, great design aesthetics, and cutting edge hardware. They aren't perfect, but what tablet is?
Asus can make great hardware all day; but without the right marketing and the right software, it will never be successful.
Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) is the first arrival of a real competitor to iOS in my opinion.
Google floundered about quite a bit trying to get the UI right (honestly, it seemed like they were ignoring it completely for a while); and 4.0 and 4.1 are the first versions I've used that feel "right". I'm actually pretty torn between iOS and Android at this point from a user / developer standpoint.
Although Apple still has the better developer tools for now.
I agree that the supporting tools like Instruments are much better and Android doesn't have anything to compare to Interface Builder but the better Java IDEs like IntelliJ are so far ahead of XCode that it's not even funny.
Things are going to get interesting if Apple really does release a 7" tablet. I don't think they're going to get away with just scaling down iPad apps. Maybe that's why they were emphasizing the new dynamic layout stuff at WWDC this year? Manually positioning three completely different UI layouts for each app isn't going to be much fun.
I think the dynamic UI layout is more for the iPhone 5 which based on rumours will be longer than the current iPhone e.g. 320x600. The iPad Mini is expected to be 1024x768 so all iPad apps will work without any changes needed.
But IntellIJ is still much more powerful. It's much much easier to build really powerful refactoring tools for a language like Java than it is for Obj-C.
The new LLDB is almost 20 times better than anything GDB could hope to be. Xcode 4 is pretty, but gets a zero mark on usability (you have to do a lot of things by mouse). Xcode 4.5 has been vastly improved usability-wise. If they keep up their work, I'm sure Xcode could finally be a decent and usable IDE, rather than just being pretty.
In fact, C++ is just about the only reason I still use Xcode for actually writing code. My apps that don't need C++ are all written in AppCode.
However, AppCode's C++ support is also improving so it may not be that way for long.
XCode 4's tight integration with LLVM, a Debugger, online documentation, and code completion are the reasons why I use it instead of something else.
Eclipse is satisfactory for Java development though, so I'll probably be happy enough with it when I do Android work.
The same has been said for functional languages without side effects: "A purely functional programming language is only good for heating your computer." -- Rich Hickey :)
Hopefully Google's involvement in the Nexus 7 release will remedy this.
These issues are very rare though, perhaps once a month, and are fixed with a reboot.
So I count that as stable.
The ease that is worked around (unplug it from the keyboard at night) means it is more of an inconvenience than a big problem (for me anyway).
I believe it can be fixed by putting CyanogenMod on it anyway.
But I'm the kind of guy who roots, install via ZIPs from XDA and all that stuff. Even if the guy who packaged the ICS update insisted on it being untouched stock, except pre-rooted, it's hard to know 100% certain if the error is Asus' or not. At least there are other possible sources of errors.
That said, ever since I moved my TF101 over to a CM9 codebase, I've had zero issues with it, and it has finally become the tablet I thought it would be when I decided to purchase it in the first place.
Yes. I know. My grandma is never going to do all that. I'm not suggesting that.
But if Google can get the software on this thing right, out of the box, like they've done with the Nexus-phones, I'm pretty sure this thing can fly.