ASUS has worked in its own onscreen keyboard, one that gives you a number row at the top, tweaks button arrangements, and includes single-button input for smiley faces, but that's only an optional extra -- the default Android Honeycomb keyboard is but a couple of taps away. We found the ASUS keyboard most useful when putting in passwords, as we could enter full alphanumeric strings without having to switch between keyboards, though on the whole we found neither option entirely satisfactory. We were never able to feel entirely comfortable or in control with the Transformer's software text input. There's a small delay in responding to your taps -- something that's missing on the iPad, whose virtual keyboard feels an epoch ahead of what we're dealing with here -- which leads to uncertainty as to whether letters have been registered, eventually resulting in an inconsistent and frustrating time for the user.
A lack of responsiveness is also evident throughout the Android UI. Aside from a delay in activating the function you've selected, there are also troubling instances where input isn't registered at all. That leaves the user with no less than three potential scenarios when she doesn't see an immediate response -- she could be looking at lag, an unregistered tap because of software, or an unregistered tap because the physical input was too light. Such uncertainty doesn't build a great user experience and the Transformer, unfortunately, doesn't offer a great user experience. Much of that is, regrettably, down to Honeycomb itself. It's not a finished product yet. It's actually a fair distance away from a finished product. Some apps are done to absolute perfection while a lot of the "glue" bits, the stuff that goes between the apps and basically makes up the OS, is either confused, not responsive enough, or broken in some other way. Let's take these things in turn, starting with the good parts.