Having spend a few days with it my impressions fairly positive, but it's not perfect. Although to be honest a lot of my gripes are down to W8 rather than the device itself.
Screen is more than adequate, brighness isn't quite as good as an iPad retina, but not far off. Obviously the resolution is much lower, but the quality is good overall. Microsoft seems to have changed text rendering in the ModernUI, and as such the text in some apps appears a little jagged - I would imagine on a 1080P screen this wouldn't be as noticeable.
Performance is surprisingly good actually, I have a system using a Celeron 1037u chip (Haswell) and it is noticeably quicker but performance from this Atom/Baytrail is very good. I've upgraded from a somewhat dated AMD E450 based laptop, and it's vastly better. I do think it could benefit from an 4gb RAM though.
I've been playing around with XBMC, and have found that both 720P and 1080P videos play perfectly well if you've got a decent enough Wifi connection. I wouldn't want to stream a very large 1080P file over wifi though. Even TV playback over wifi was good, although I've not checked CPU usage yet for this as it's typically higher.
The small hard drive will be an issue for a lot of people, 15gb isn't really that much to have left over from the 32gb - but it's a 2 edged sword as the 32gb drive means it can hit the price point.
Battery life is very good also, I've not ran any conclusive tests but "all day battery" sums it up nicely. It's actually quite difficult to gague battery life as W8 doesn't appear to estimate battery rundown time, and it doesn't easily show the battery % from the ModernUI interface.
There's a couple of small gripes I have with the tablet ergonomics/hardware - but nothing major. A full USB port would have been nice, I beleive the micro USB port will work with an adapter, but I've yet to test this yet and it means having to use the adapter which is a bit of a pain.
The MicroSD slot as mentioned above is USB2, so it won't benefit from having a card any faster than a standard Class10. I'm also not a fan of where it's placed as I've inadvertently clicked it out a couple of times. Personally I think it would be better placed on the top or bottom of the device.
The keyboard dock, whilst a nice addition is not quite as useable as I would have liked. Granted, it's always going to be a challenge on a small screen device such as this however. As I'd mentioned previously in this thread, the trackpad by default supports edge swiping - but the trackpad is too small for this IMO. A good example of this is the top swipe action. It's very, very easy to do this by accident. Using chrome in desktop mode meant that it was constantly flicking in and out of fullscreen mode (which is what the top swipe does by default in Chrome). I also had some two-finger scrolling issues which were resolved by updating the drivers. It's a 100% improvement, and definitely worth doing. It's probably worth noting that the "Asus live update" software didn't/wouldn't show there were new drivers available - so it obviously doesn't work very well and I've since removed it.
The keyboard itself takes a little getting used to, it's very small and cramped so will not suit everyone, especially those with Shrek-like hands. It would be useful if the Function keys (F1-F12) defaulted to their system shortcuts like brightness/volume etc rather than the F useage.
Another thing to note is that it's not quite as lap friendly as traditional laptops/netbooks. Because device is heavy on top (i.e. the tablet) it has a tendency to want to fall backwards if you have the screen tilted backwards. They keyboard dock felt very heavy to me at first (considering there is no battery/hard drive in there). It wouldn't surprise me if Asus have actually weighed it down slighled to help with this problem. I've had a look at some larger convertible devices (such as the HP Pavillion X2, and Split 13) and both were considerably heavier on the tablet, so I think would be less lap-friendly for the same reason I think.
Overall I'm more pleased with it than I thought I was going to be. I had been half expecting to return it after a few days but I think I'm going to stick with it until something better comes along. Cost aside, the Dell Venue 11 is a better device and the i3 version would probably be almost ideal for me - but it's a lot more expensive. Even the baytrail version once spec'd with keyboard is much more expensive, so kudos to Asus at being able to get this down to ~£300 all in.
think it's happening after I'm restarting Windows after automatic updates are installed
Good luck.
