Asus Transformer AiO: an 18.4 inch Android tablet that turns into a PC. Don't ask why.

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Has anyone in the history of computing ever wanted an 18.4-inch Android tablet? How about an 18.4-inch Android tablet that transforms into a dumb 18.4-inch display the moment you dock it into its Intel Ivy Bridge-powered stand?

The tablet portion is powered by an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core CPU, running Android 4.1 with an as yet unnamed Ivy Bridge CPU and Nvidia GT 730M GPU sat in the PC Station stand.

So, when you're roaming about with your giganto-tablet in tow you can run your Android apps as standard and when you're docked it becomes a fully featured Windows 8 machine. Plus, it's running wireless Remote Desktop tech so you can still have access to your Windows apps around the home at a flick of a switch.

You may have sense it already, but I'm not so terribly fussed about this whole all-in-one concept, but there are things which pique my interest. The Remote Desktop streaming service is a thing with potential - especially given that Nvidia's SHIELD isn't too far away now. Once that's out I've got a feeling we'll start seeing a lot more Nvidia Tegra-based tablets that will happily communicate with Nvidia GeForce-powered desktop machines.

Not that I'd want to play all my games streaming from my PC to my tablet, but I still quite like the idea of my desktop rig capable of being a local game-streamer as well as a media hub.

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Dave James
Dave James
Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.