What a mouthful that name is. What we actually have here is the newer version of the Asus Transleeve case. The original Transleeve was a single piece of material with an attachment to fit into the hinge mechanism on the Asus Transformer tablets. Asus have decided it would be a good idea to protect the entire tablet and keep the foldable kickstand front cover. Asus sell these in a variety of colours and I went for the blue model and boy is it a bright blue.
Design
The case is made of a nice soft touch material with a sort of foam texture, the inside of the case is a soft touch velvety material, it’s nice.
The case is designed to work in two different ways, either as a case for the entire Transformer and keyboard dock or just the tablet with an origami styled kickstand. The top half of the case holds the tablet in place and at first glance I couldn’t work out how it could remain intact, then I spotted some tape covering something sticky. I guessed they wanted me to stick the casing to the tablet to hold it steady, as I was a little unsure I decided to hold off on this for a while.
Around the edges of the top half you get some extra material that they just decided to flatten out, this is so that both parts are the same overall width, but as you’ll see it just looks a little odd. Also the casing makes the already hard to use power switch even harder to operate when covered up.
The bottom half of the case holds the keyboard dock in place (no sticky stuff down here) using two elasticated bits of material so you can easily remove the keyboard dock if needed.
If you close the whole case up the final flap is magnetised so the case stays shut.
In use
I decided to put the whole thing to the test so I started out with just the tablet and tried to understand the folding instructions, the kickstand never really stays put and the extra material around the screen is really starting to annoying me though.
Next I decided to connect up the keyboard, as everything is quite flexible getting the keyboard docked wasn’t too traumatic however the magnetic closure flap would rather obscure the trackpad and part of the keyboard than nicely fold out of the way. I had to fold this flap away under the keyboard dock for it to be usable. Which left the whole thing on an odd angle.
So far both methods had left me feeling compromised, neither worked how I would like and the tablet just felt annoying to use and perched at weird angles.
If you close the Transformer up the case really does look nice, kind of like a premium minimal laptop case. This time round the magnetic flap does a good job of closing the whole tablet up.
Conclusion
Overall I liked the look of the case, the quality, the colour and the soft material on the inside are all good points. The odd extra material, the sticky stuff, the odd magnetic flap, the strange folding kickstand and the price are all bad points.
At £29.99 it’s hard to recommend as there are lots of third parties offering cases at a fraction of the cost. If you want to check them out though head over to the Asus UK accesory store (details here).
About James Pearce
I spend most of the day telling people to turn stuff off and back on again. Inbetween doing that I post news and reviews over here.
I am about to embark on a Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT self imposed restriction for a few months. Keep your eyes on the site for updates.
