Being "cool" is a fleeting sensation for Silicon Valley companies, where innovation moves at breakneck speeds, competition is relentless and users often fickle. But when you're an 11-year-old publicly traded company like Facebook, it means dealing with th

Motorola has long taken the extreme route with its naming conventions and Samsung always seems to promise an entire Galaxy. But Asus’s approach is far less dramatic than much of the competition.

The company has focused its efforts on taking a far more peaceful approach to consumer electronics, first through its Zen line and now in the form of its latest Transformer convertible tablet, the T300 Chi.
In Taoist philosophy, Chi represents the vital life force circulating through all living things — and more to the point, in the case of this Windows 8.1 tablet, a balance between negative and positive forces essential to harmonic living.For Asus, it's striking the he two often-at odds gadget categories of laptop and tablet, an attempt to design a product that fulfills the need for both.

It’s also, coincidentally Microsoft’s dream with Windows 8. Given the current state of electronics, it seemingly shouldn’t be an impossible dream. Yet it has traditionally been a difficult one to pull off. Past attempts have often been too underpowered for laptop status or too bulky to truly function as a tablet. As with the Taoist principle, it’s a concept much easier said than done.

With the T300 Chi, Asus has seemingly drawn a line in the sand, describing the convertible not as a tablet and keyboard dock. For the company, it's but rather as an “ultra-slim laptop [that] transforms seamlessly into a tablet.” A device rooted in the notion that balance is truly attainable.

The one-two punch

The greatest trick the T300 Chi plays is convincing the world that it is a laptop. No joke, there were a handful of occasions in which I forgot the display also happened to be a touchscreen tablet. Several times, I forgot that the power button was located on the display like a tablet. Blame it on my short-term memory, if you must, but I’ve chosen the seamless integration of the slate and dock as the real culprit. 

In fact, the next time I am at a coffee shop I plan to mess with the mind of the dude across from me writing his screenplay by “accidentally” ripping the screen off my shiny new laptop. I’ll let you know how that works.

Taken together, the tablet and keyboard clasp together at 0.64-inches, an impressive feat for a 2-in-1 device that shaves a few precious fractions of an inch off the latest MacBook Air. At 3.15 pounds, it’s notably heavier than some of the ultraportable competition, but certainly light enough to comfortably pop into a backpack.

Tear-away tablet

Asus should require users to spend some time with past Surface tablets before picking up the T300 Chi to help customers grasp just how slick the Windows 8.1 tablet is.
This thing makes Microsoft’s devices feel like bulky, early prototypes. Stripped of its keyboard, the slate weighs 1.58 pounds, notably lighter than the Surface 3’s1.76 pound weight.

The hardware’s real centerpiece, however is its lovely 2,560 x 1,440 resolution (WQHD) display. Compare that to, say, the 1,440 x 900 on the 13-inch Macbook Air. The screen's really a sight to behold, perfect for watching movies on, but the colors are oddly oversaturated, a phenomenon that’s particularly noticeable among Windows 8's brightly colored tiles interface.

The speakers are located on either side of the tablet. Speaker positioning is a tricky proposition when it comes to tablets; I'm not too fond of how one's hands can easily block the skinny grilles while holding the tablet solo. But honestly, you’re not really missing much — the things are pretty dismal.

Asus’s claim of “premium stereo sound” are pretty far afield. You’re going to want to plug in or sync somewhere else if you’re planning to watch a full movie. Perhaps this is a bit of a bulky pipe dream, but what about a little bit of supplemental speaker power in the keyboard dock?

More tablet than PC

The $899 model Asus set us up with has some some solid innards, including 8GB of RAM and a solid 128GB of storage, which you can double via a little microSD slot tucked away on the bottom of the tablet. The 1.2GHZ Intel Core M 5Y71 is plenty capable of zippy multitasking, but won’t be doing any graphical heavy-lifting any time soon.

That’s a key distinction with the T300 Chi, incidentally — as much as it looks like a full-on ultrabook from the outside, the hardware specs put it well within the high-end tablet camp. 
It’s not a device capable of fulfilling all of your laptop needs, but rather supplementing them — a fact made all the more apparent by the presence of things like the Micro USB 3.0 port, which requires an adapter to work with full-size USB accessories.

Other subtler touches like the placement of the power button in the upper left corner seem to point to a device designed as a tablet first. I found it extremely difficult to manually adjust the screen angle without accidentally hitting the button. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but it’s a constant reminder of just how difficult it is to juggle those worlds.

What’s up (with the) dock

The tablet connects magnetically to the dock, snapping around a pair of metal tongs. Once in place, the tablet is secure, though the slate will wobble a bit if you tap the screen too aggressively. Interestingly, the tongs only serve to hold the tablet in place. All communication between the two parts actually happen via Bluetooth, meaning you’ll have to wake the keyboard up separately.

This also means that you’ve got two separate batteries that need charging — though you can simply run a cord between the tablet and dock while the former is plugged in for a sort of daisy-chained charging routine. And as with the speakers, it feels like there’s a missed opportunity to include an extended battery in the dock to help bolster the tablet’s limited life.

In fact, I’d have welcomed a little more weight on the keyboard. As it stands, the device is extremely top heavy, and if you’re prone to use your laptop in your lap, it’ll be prone to topple over. When using the combo, you’re going to want to position them on a flat surface.

The keyboard itself is nice, if perhaps a little on the soft side — but nothing a user won’t quickly acclimate to. The trackpad, meanwhile, is a bit short, owing to the tablet’s dimension, but remember, you’ve also got the power of touch working for you here. Once again, it leaves something to be desired in terms of a primary laptop, but should make for a perfectly acceptable travel device.

An uneven balance

There’s a lot to like with the T300 Chi. It’s a hybrid Windows 8.1 device that subscribes wholeheartedly to the notion that it can truly be the best of both worlds — and it comes a heck of a lot closer than so many past attempts. In the end, however, the T300 Chi naturally falls a little short in its attempt to please everyone all the time.
The T300 Chi misses the ultraportable PC mark, instead falling into the high-end tablet space. Much to its credit, it does so with a lot of style. It’s a really gorgeous piece of hardware with some high-end specs — high-end for a tablet, that is.

As high-minded as the Chi concept it invokes is, it’s a reminder of how difficult balance can be between the two spaces. Taken as a PC, the device may fall short, but, some hardware quibbles aside, this is easily one of the best Windows tablets on the market.