Asus Transformer Pad TF103C review: This hybrid is better for fun than work

Asus Transformer Pad TF103C $319.00 The Transformer Pad TF103C is a solid tablet for entertainment and other casual uses, but it won't supplant a true notebook if you're looking to boost your productivity while you're on the road.

I enjoyed the Windows-based Transformer Book T100 I tested a few months ago, so I was excited to see how its Android-powered sibling would stack up. The engineers at Asus engineers have now proven themselves to be pros at designing 2-in-1 tablet/laptop hybrids running in both Windows and Android flavors. But the names they’ve chosen for these two devices are telling: The Windows device conjures the image of a notebook, while the Android device evokes the iPad.

The Asus Transformer Pad TF103C might look like a small Windows 2-in-1 notebook, but it runs the Android OS (KitKat). 

The Transformer Pad TF103C is an interesting mix of what Asus has learned from working both sides of the OS fence. It’s based on an Intel Bay Trail-class processor—the quad-core Atom Z3745—that’s more commonly found in Windows machines (Android devices are more typically powered by ARM chips). The Android OS (Android 4.4, aka KitKat in this case) can live comfortably in 8GB of storage, and it runs well with just 1GB of RAM, which is what the TF103C has. Windows needs at least 4GB of memory and 32GB of storage—and even then you’ll feel pinched when you go to install application software alongside it.

I found the trackpad to be surprisingly useful with Android apps.

Using the lightweight OS enabled Asus to cut back on RAM and storage, dropping the device’s street price to a wallet-friendly $299—including the keyboard dock.

This Transformer feels like so many earlier models in this product family. The tablet half is pleasantly curved, with a soft-touch backing that feels great in your hand. It’s slimmer than earlier incarnations—measuring just 0.4 inches thick—and weighs in at only 1.2 pounds.

The main difference between the Android-based TF103C’s 10.1-inch display and the same-sized display in the Windows-based TF100 is that the Android tablet’s screen has resolution of 1280x800 pixels, where the T100’s screen delivers resolution of 1366x768. I’m a fan of vertical pixels, especially in the context of productivity, so the TF103C has the advantage here. The screen also gets both very bright and very dim, making this bedtime reader happy.

Both machines come in at an identical 2.4 pounds with their keyboard docks. That’s a good carrying weight for a 10-inch laptop, although the T100 has the option of a dock with a hard drive inside if you don’t mind the extra bulk. 

The Transformer Pad has but one USB port, and it's on the keyboard half of the product.

Being an Android tablet, the TF103C doesn’t have as many I/O ports as you’ll find on a Windows laptop. There’s micro USB for charging and a microSD card slot additional storage. You’ll need to attach the keyboard to get a full-size USB 2.0 slot.

Media capabilities include a headset jack, stereo speakers, a rather low-res (0.3 megapixels) front-facing camera, and a 2MP camera on its back. The TF103C supports 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and Miracast (for wireless video streaming to displays that support that standard).

The keyboard dock is comfortable to type on, with keys that are as well-spaced as they can be for a 10-inch device. I found the trackpad surprisingly useful with Android. As touch-centric as that OS might be, it’s sometimes easier to move your finger to the keyboard deck than to reach across the keyboard to stroke the touchscreen. Function keys are more specific to the OS and are moderately useful as such.

The Intel Atom processor gives the TF103C an advantage over other Android tablets that we’ve tested recently, beating both the Lenovo Yoga 10 and Dell Venue 8 in our benchmark tests. The Asus’s 6-hour and 58-minute run time is on the short side for Android tablets, and it’s far short of the 11 hours the Windows-based Transformer Book T100 delivered.

This is where things with the TF103C started to break down for me. Despite having an iPad, an Android tablet, an Android phone, one or another Linux device, and several MacBooks in my past, I’m pretty entrenched in the Windows world when it comes to getting stuff done. I have several programs I use that are still either Windows-only, or they've only just recently been ported to Android.

For example, I do most of my writing in Microsoft’s OneNote note-taking software. Using the OneNote Android app was not a smooth experience. Clicking and dragging on text does not highlight it. I had to reach up and hold my finger on the screen, then push the cursor around to highlight text. I tried to switch over to Evernote, which works much better on the TF103C, but not with my workflow. If you’re an Evernote user, you’ll be quite happy working in the Android app on the Transformer, especially with the solid keyboard.

The Chrome web browser is pre-installed, but I found that many of the sites I frequent either rendered much more slowly, or defaulted to the mobile versions. You can use bookmarks to make sure the right versions load, but the slow loading will be more problematic. Feedly has a wonderful mobile app that's great for reading news on my phone, but I found it too awkward when scaled up to tablet size. I had to reach up and touch the screen to scroll versus using the keyboard shortcuts I’m used to in the browser.

Android is a touch-centric OS, but the Transformer Pad's trackpad proved to be surprisingly useful. 

I had to abandon some other Android apps that I love to use on my phone, because they just don’t play nicely with tablet-sized devices. I found myself just giving up on the keyboard for browsing and navigating certain apps, choosing instead to pick up the tablet and just use it on the couch rather than pretend I had a laptop.

Which lead to the next issue: The onscreen keyboard is terrible. Perhaps I’m just too used to the Windows 8.1 keyboard or the iPad keyboard at this point, but I really struggled with it.

The Transformer Pad TF103C is an excellent companion tablet, with the potential to be a useful tool if you can find solid Android versions of your favorite productivity software. But dyed-in-the-wool Windows users will be much happier with Asus’s Transformer Book T100, which is street-priced just $40 higher (for the 32GB model; the 64GB model is going for $375).

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LG Debuts Ultra PC and Tab-Book 2 Hybrid Ahead of CES

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Lenovo ThinkPad Helix review: A versatile but expensive Ultrabook/tablet hybrid

Lenovo’s ThinkPad Helix is nothing if not versatile. This 11.6-inch Windows 8 Pro touchscreen tablet can operate as such, dock to a razor-thin keyboard to become a dual-battery notebook PC, and then flip with acrobatic ease to become a desktop presenter.

ROBERT CARDINLenovo's ThinkPad Helix is one of the best laptop/tablet hybrids we've seen so far.

The Helix also boasts a 128GB solid-state drive, which boosts its performance on tasks involving data transfers between storage and memory (boot, return from sleep, and application launches, for example). The presence of the SSD played no small part in the Helix’s respectable Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 285, which was nearly three times better than that of our reference system (an Asus VivoBook S550CA, which augments its mechanical hard drive with a 24GB SSD cache). The Helix also earned an outstanding PCMark 7 storage test score of 5308, one of the best results we’ve seen. (WorldBench 8.1 consists of a suite of synthetic and real-world benchmarks, of which PCMark 7 is one element.)

A 128GB SSD helped the ThinkPad Helix deliver a good benchmark performance.

In configurations that use both the tablet and the keyboard, we saw impressive battery life of 6.5 hours thanks to the presence of a battery in each component. The Helix’s longevity dropped to just 2 hours when operating as a tablet with a single battery.

In most tasks less dependent on hard-disk access, the Helix still performed solidly, if not as brilliantly. Outfitted with an Intel Core i5-3337U mobile CPU (based on 2012’s Ivy Bridge architecture) and 4GB of DDR3/1333 memory that it must share with the Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics hardware, our review unit suffered most in gaming tests.

All this power and versatility doesn’t come cheap. Our review unit, the least expensive of the available configurations on Lenovo’s website, carried a $1679 price tag ($1427 after an instant rebate) as of August 5, 2013. Conventional touchscreen Windows 8 laptops are widely available for less than $1000.

In usability, the Helix generally lives up to Lenovo’s reputation for well-built portables. The black soft-touch case feels good when you’re handling the tablet, and the keyboard boasts Lenovo’s signature, pleasing contours and snappy action. For pointing, you get to choose among a responsive touchpad with multitouch support, a red eraserhead joystick button, and of course the digitizing touchscreen. Separating the keyboard takes only a second or two and doesn’t require a reboot. In our tests the touchscreen responded well to swipes.

ROBERT CARDINSeparate the Helix's display from its keyboard, and you have a fully functional Windows 8 tablet.

The integrated high-def webcam produced smooth-looking video on Skype calls, and its low-light technology worked well. The integrated microphone picked up my voice well, but the Helix’s audio is very disappointing. Even when I turned it all the way up, I could barely hear the voice of Skype callers, and music on YouTube videos was positively faint. This problem could be a deal-breaker for someone who needs to make presentations on the road.

I have a few other quibbles as well: Although the Helix maintains the sub-0.75-inch thickness appropriate for an ultraportable, the machine is heavy for its display size, weighing a full 3.6 pounds with the keyboard and 1.8 pounds without it.

Lenovo provides a plastic stylus that slides into a slot on the tablet, but I didn’t enjoy using it because it was imprecise—a real issue on the 1920-by-1080-pixel widescreen IPS display. That resolution on an 11.6-inch display made for good-looking videos on YouTube and Skype, but it also resulted in very tiny type on many websites, including a few that use Flash or other technologies that don’t support pinch and zoom. I sometimes found myself squinting, and using the stylus to select radio buttons (fingertips being too blunt an instrument) was generally a hit-or-miss affair.

In tablet mode, you get one Mini DisplayPort connection, one USB 2.0 port, a SIM-card slot for optional mobile broadband, and a combo headphone/microphone jack. The keyboard dock adds a pair of USB 3.0 ports and a Mini DisplayPort connection. But I missed having an SD Card reader, and depending on a USB dongle for ethernet connections is a bit of drag (the Helix does support both 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi).

The ThinkPad Helix deserves kudos for its innovative design, and a business user in search of a laptop-tablet convertible with good performance might find the high price tag palatable. (And if money is no object, you can upgrade to a faster processor, add more solid-state storage capacity, and tack on on the aforementioned mobile-broadband feature.)

If a high-performance tablet is all you need, note that Microsoft recently slashed the price of its 128GB Surface Pro to $899. But that tablet’s screen is an inch smaller, and you’ll need to add $130 to get the Type Cover keyboard (which, in addition to being inferior to the Helix’s, lacks a trackpad).

Contributing Editor Yardena (Denny) Arar is a San Francisco-based freelance writer, avid online shopper, media junkie, consummate foodie, and proud possessor of a private pilot's license.
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Review: Asus VivoTab Smart offers full Windows 8 OS in hybrid tablet form

Despite all the Microsoft Surface hype, Windows 8 tablets have yet to find their niche. It’s difficult, after all, to be more expensive than Apple’s ever-cool iPad, yet less usable than a reasonably cheap laptop.

So what can the Asus VivoTab Smart—a slim little 10.1-inch tablet with a Clover Trail processor—bring to the table? Well, for one thing, it’s relatively cheap: the VivoTab starts at just $499, and that includes 64GB of built-in storage. It also runs the full version of Windows 8, so you don’t have to settle for Windows RT.

Just because it runs a desktop OS doesn't mean it runs like a PC, of course. Compare it to a low-powered Ultrabook, and it's toast. It’s moderately powerful for a tablet, however, scoring higher than similarly appointed models with Intel Pentium 6 CPUs and 2GB of memory, such as the Samsung XE500T1C-A01 and the Acer Iconia W510-1422. Battery life is good and long, at 7 hours and 36 minutes in our tests.

Of course, the $499 price tag doesn’t include the VivoTab’s accessories: a Smart Cover-esque magnetic screen protector that folds into a stand, and a separate, Bluetooth keyboard and touchpad. The screen protector/keyboard combo costs an additional $130, which means it’s about $629 for the full VivoTab Smart experience. This is still a fairly good deal—the Dell XPS 10 tablet with keyboard bundle also costs $629, but it has half the built-in storage.

The VivoTab itself is pretty enough: it has a solid polycarbonate back in white, black, or red, a 10.1-inch glossy screen surrounded by a medium bezel, and a maximum thickness of about 0.38 inches. It weighs a mere 1.28 pounds (580 grams), and the accessories add hardly any additional weight or thickness.

The IPS screen offers up decent coloration (whites look a tad yellowish at lower brightness settings) and good touchscreen responsiveness and accuracy. It also has excellent off-axis viewing angles, though the screen isn’t quite as bright as I usually like. It’s 350 nits, which isn’t quite good enough for outdoor viewing. By comparison, the latest iPad’s screen is about 400 nits.

Ports and slots are pretty limited—it is a tablet, after all. There are no buttons aside from the power button, volume rocker, and touch-sensitive Windows button on the front bezel. There’s also a MicroSD slot, MicroUSB port, and a micro HDMI slot, as well as a 2-in-1 audio jack. As far as connectivity goes, the VivoTab is actually better equipped than expected, with built-in Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, and an NFC chip.

Looks aside, the VivoTab Smart’s real appeal are its accessories. There are two accessories, though they’re sold together as a bundle. The Smart Cover-like screen protector is what Asus calls the “Transleeve.” It comes in several colors, including black, pink, and light blue, and connects to the VivoTab via a magnet along the side. Though the Transleeve looks like Apple’s Smart Cover for the iPad, it doesn’t act like a Smart Cover—that is, it doesn’t automatically wake/sleep the VivoTab when you pull it open. It does, however, lay flush against the VivoTab’s screen for a moderate amount of scratch protection.

What’s cool about the Transleeve is that it folds into a stand. Folding it is easy—there are scored lines that show you where you’re supposed to bend it, and there are built-in magnets that help it stay in place. The stand lets you use the tablet in an upright position or a lower, angled position. I assume the upright position is for use with the external keyboard, while the angled position is more for typing directly on the tablet. The only issue I had with the stand was that it’s not adjustable, and the upright position offers a bit too much lean for my liking. I’d prefer a keyboard dock that lets you adjust the screen position.

The Bluetooth keyboard accessory is surprisingly pleasant to use. Not only is it extremely lightweight and slim—you wouldn’t think twice about tossing this in your bag alongside the VivoTab—it’s surprisingly comfortable to type on. Well, relatively speaking. The island-style keys are small, but well-spaced, and they offer considerable tactile feedback. It’s certainly not my first choice among keyboards, but as far as externals go, it’s pretty good.

As a lightweight hybrid that’s more tablet than laptop, the Asus VivoTab Smart is a decent choice. This tablet is both extremely portable and usable, and the full Windows 8 OS is a welcome bonus.

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
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Hybrid hard drives: How they work and why they matter

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them, studied music at Julliard, and power mods his car for kicks.
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An SSD can read and write data many times faster than the best mechanical hard drive. On the downside, flash memory is many times more expensive than the innards of a typical hard drive, so manufacturers have limited their SSD capacities to hit reasonable price points: A 128GB SSD costs about $130, and for that same price tag, you can buy a 3.5-inch desktop hard drive that delivers 2TB of storage, or a 2.5-inch laptop drive that provides 1TB of storage.

Two years ago, Seagate (quickly followed by Samsung) introduced a drive that married a small SSD with a mechanical drive. The objective was to deliver the superior speed of an expensive SSD, while retaining the higher capacity and lower cost of a conventional hard drive. Now that Toshiba and Western Digital are joining the party, it's a great time to explain in more detail what hybrid drives are and how they operate.

Hybrid drives work much in the same way as the current dual-technology configurations in many gaming and power-user PCs, as well as some ultraportable laptops. Such systems have a small, discrete SSD to hold the operating system and frequently used data, augmented by a more capacious conventional hard drive for less frequently accessed data and large collections of documents and digital media.

Current hybrid drive designs, in contrast, deliver both technologies within a single physical unit, and they employ software caching algorithms (rather than relying on the user's brain) to decide which data belongs on the SSD portion and what goes on the drive’s platters.

These caching algorithms reside in the hybrid drive's firmware, not the device driver. To the computer’s operating system, a hybrid drive appears as a single unit with the SSD portion acting strictly as a large cache. The cache is nonvolatile, so the data doesn't disappear when power is absent.

You can find several hybrid designs on the market, but the most common is a 2.5-inch version meant for laptops, Seagate's Momentus XT SSHD. Seagate refers to the caching logic it uses on the Momentus XT drives as Adaptive Memory technology. The thinner 7mm, 2.5-inch drives that Toshiba and Western Digital recently announced are destined for Ultrabooks. They will likely use similar technologies with similarly suitable names, although either company might opt to skip caching and produce a dual SSD/hard drive in a single physical package.

In any case, a caching algorithm will track the files you load the most often (operating system files, applications, and the like), and store them on the SSD portion of the drive. From that point on, these files will load into memory much faster than they did from the mechanical drive, although some overhead will be involved as the computer determines whether the file in question resides on the SSD. No caching will have occurred the first time you use a hybrid drive, so its initial performance will be the same as that of a mechanical hard drive, but the speed will increase over time.

To test a current implementation and to determine how much improvement you can expect over the long term, we ran a special version of WorldBench 7 six times using a 750GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive with its 8GB internal SSD.

The WorldBench 7 score for Seagate's Momentus XT hybrid drive indicates that it's a little faster than a conventional hard drive, but much slower than a true SSD.

Over the course of the six runs, system boot times dropped from 35 seconds to 31 seconds, and the WorldBench 7 score rose from 112 to 116. That's about a 12 percent improvement in boot times, and a 4 percent jump in WorldBench. However, the WorldBench 7 score of a nonhybrid, 5400-rpm drive also climbed by 4 percent—most likely due to Windows 7's own caching technologies. The standard drive showed no decrease in boot times, so the current Seagate hybrid drives do offer some benefit.

WorldBench 7 measures application performance, not the load times of the applications themselves, though subjectively the load times seemed only slightly faster after the first pass in my hands-on tests when I eliminated the Windows prefetch and swap file. Let's call that further, marginal evidence that a hybrid can make a positive difference in your everyday computing. Just for comparison's sake, a good SSD scored more than 40 points higher on WorldBench 7 on the same system.

The specs for the upcoming Toshiba and Western Digital hybrid drives weren't available at the time of this writing; however, you might see models with 16GB or even 32GB SSD portions that provide a greater increase in performance. The larger the SSD in the hybrid drive, the more data you can cache and the less often you'll need to load data from the hybrid’s slower mechanical drive. Integration and interaction with operating systems could also boost hybrid performance, assuming of course that a significant drop in SSD prices doesn't render the technology moot.

As of October 10, 2012, a standard 750GB, 2.5-inch hard drive was about $80, a 750GB Momentus XT SSHD was about $130, and a brand-name 128GB SSD also cost about $130. Given those prices, current hybrid drives really make sense only in laptops, and only when you want high performance and more storage capacity than an SSD can provide.

In a desktop PC with unoccupied drive bays, you'll get much better bang for your buck with a stand-alone SSD combined with one or more mechanical hard drives. Even for a laptop, a smaller, more affordable SSD supplemented by an external conventional hard drive might better deliver the performance and the capacity you're looking for.

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Sony’s VAIO Duo 11 Windows 8 Hybrid Appears Online

Samsung isn’t the only one with a Windows 8 hybrid up its sleeve. PocketNow has obtained photos of just such a device hailing from Sony, and the Sony VAIO Duo 11 looks attractive enough — and business-friendly enough — that it might just give the Microsoft Surface tablet a run for its money.

The website’s source didn’t divulge any information about the hybrid’s actual hardware components, but the “11? in “VAIO Duo 11? likely signifies the screen size. Digging into the images, it looks as though the VAIO Duo 11 will run Windows 8, given the appearance of a desktop version of Office in one of the pictures. Every image features a prominently displayed stylus and the keyboard is backlit.

Speaking of the keyboard, it appears as though Sony has opted to include a built-in, slide-out keyboard similar to the one in the Asus Eee Pad Slider rather than a Surface-esque optional stand or a detachable keyboard like the Samsung Series 5 Hybrid, which sports a magnetic connection at the hinge.

Other manufacturers have even more varied visions of how a keyboard and tablet should meld, and we’re hoping to see several Windows 8 hybrids unveiled this week at IFA 2012. Online editorial director Avram Piltch is on the floor in Berlin and will be keeping you up to date on all the latest and greatest gadgets being shown off. 

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Samsung Teases Windows 8 Hybrid Tablet, Coming to IFA 2012

Samsung may have just suffered a billion dollar blow at the hands of Apple, but if an intriguing teaser is any indication, at least one of the company’s upcoming products won’t have to worry about being accused of being an iPad rip-off. A post on Samsung Notebook’s Facebook page shows a Windows 8 tablet sitting atop notebook keyboard, indicating the company is gearing up to officially announce a hybrid device at the IFA 2012 trade show that starts Friday.

“Don’t worry, it’s just around the corner…” the post teases, but what exactly is “it?” It very well could be the Samsung Series 5 Hybrid the company showed us earlier in the year. The Samsung Series 5 Hybrid’s keyboard attaches to the tablet portion at the hinge using a magnetic connector, allowing you to easily remove the tablet portion alone for less cumbersome transportation when you only need a slate. The design may sound somewhat questionable, but the magnetic connection felt very secure during our short time with the Hybrid. Most hybrid Windows 8 devices we’ve seen use a physical latch instead.

When we visited the company in Korea earlier this year, Samsung told us it plans to offer two variations of the Samsung Series 5 Hybrid, one with a smartphone-type processor and another with an Intel ULV CPU. Each will sport a touch-tastic 11.6-inch display, but only the model with the ULV processor will include a true 1080p HD screen.

Is this the teaser for the Samsung Series 5 Hybrid or are we barking up the wrong tree entirely? We’ll know later in the week when IFA 2012 kicks off. We’ll be at the event to bring you coverage straight from the show floor.

Via The Verge

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Intel Shows Off Cove Point Tablet-Ultrabook Hybrid Running Windows 8

Is this the future of Windows notebooks? At IDF 2012 in Beijing, Intel showed off an Ultrabook hybrid running a Consumer Preview of Windows 8. This laptop-tablet hybrid, dubbed Cove Point by Intel, features an Ivy Bridge processor as well as a 12.5-inch touchscreen, HDMI output and two USB 3.0 ports.

At first blush, the device looks more like a tablet than a clamshell laptop – when closed, the touchscreen lies flush against the back of the device, facing upward. Pushing the screen forward and up reveals the keyboard beneath and transforms the device from a tablet to a laptop.

Although a release date for the Cove Point Ultrabook-hybrid hasn’t been set, the device is rumored to cost as much as $1,000.

via Wired

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Terrapets Android App Review: A Pokemon-FarmVille Hybrid

What happens when you combine FarmVille and Pokemon? You get Terrapets, a terraforming-and-creature-battling Android game from CerebralFix. Unfortunately, though the concept of combining FarmVille and Pokemon is novel, Terrapets lacks any real motivators to keep you playing for longer than a few minutes.

Terrapets is pretty straightforward: It's a "terraforming" game, or a game in which you build up the surrounding land however you like, but with a twist. Instead of tending your land so that you can raise crops, you're trying to catch and tame (and sometimes battle) fantasy creatures.

You start out with a bare-bones wildlife reserve. Your first objective is to cultivate the land, turning it into grassland, swamps, forests, lakes, and the like. Afterward, you can start placing traps to catch some Terrapets. Your basic reserve features a cottage that gives you Terrapets cards for catching the creatures, as well as a money rock that gives you cash.

To level up, you must complete goals that the game sets for you. Traps vary (some kinds of traps catch better creatures), and what types of creatures you get will depend on where you place the traps. For example, if you place a trap on swampland, it will snag only swamp-dwelling creatures.

Once you've placed and baited a trap, all you have to do is wait. This is sort of like waiting for your crops to grow in FarmVille; you can leave the game and do other things.

When you come back to Terrapets and see that your trap has caught something (it'll be shaking), you can open the trap and try to tame the creature or battle it using one of your already-tamed Terrapets.

If you choose to tame the creature, a slot wheel appears, and your job is to stop the wheel on the right icons. First, you'll want to stop it on icons for food, so that you can feed the Terrapet and make it more amenable to being tamed. Later, you'll want to stop the slot wheel on the card icon, so that you can throw your card out and (you hope) tame the creature. However, the wheel also has other icons that will thwart you, such as a skull that makes you lose a turn, and a bottle that feeds poison to the pet.

If you want to battle the creature, the game asks you to choose one of your existing Terrapets to help. Every Terrapet has three different "moves," each of which corresponds to a rock-paper-scissors move. To battle a creature, you must choose which move to make during each turn, and hope that the rogue creature chooses a weaker move. If you win, your current Terrapet will level up, but you can’t capture the defeated creature.

Terrapets is a great idea--I'm always up for something that brings more actual gaming to time-management games--but it's still a little rough. There's a lot going on, and there's quite a bit of disconnect among the different parts of the game. For example, you get no real interaction with the creatures, aside from trying to tame or fight them. You can't see your Terrapets on your reserve, which sort of defeats the purpose of making an attractive wildlife reserve. You can battle creatures, but for what purpose? You can't catch the ones you defeat, so all you can do is have high-level Terrapets that you can't see.

Since Terrapets is still in beta, CerebralFix may be able to improve on some of these issues. Right now, nothing about this game compels me to play it for more than a few minutes--it has neither the aesthetic appeal of FarmVille nor the exciting battle/catching appeal of Pokemon. Still, it's free, and perhaps it's worth a look if you love FarmVille and/or Pokemon, and you want a new game to play.

We tested this app using a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.0.2.

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