The Eee Pad Slider comes in two colors--pearl white and metallic brown--with a smooth, rubberized back. Its vertical and horizontal dimensions are bigger than most tablets', at 10.75 by 7.1 inches. When closed, the tablet's chief attraction is its 1280-by-800-pixel IPS display, with an unusually large (almost 1-inch) bezel on the left and right sides (in landscape mode). The display looked sharp and vibrant for images, but text wasn't as crisp as I would have liked; I could see the dots, as I've come to expect from Android displays of this size and resolution. I also found the display glary at times, no doubt due in part to the visible air gap between the glass and LCD beneath.

The range of acceptable viewing angles is wide, as you'd expect from an IPS display, but it didn't quite live up to its 178 degree billing in my hands-on testing. Still, it's more than adequate for several folks to crowd around for a presentation, for example. And because the display is covered by Corning Gorilla Glass, you don't need to encumber the tablet with a case.

The Eee Pad Slider contains a typical 2011 Android component set: a 1GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2, 1GB of RAM, Android 3.2, and either 16GB or 32GB of memory.

All of the Slider's ports and buttons are situated on the lower slice, with the keyboard portion of the design. When the tablet is closed, the power button on the top left is easy to find; but I got frustrated by its location and poor physical definition when using the tablet with the keyboard open and in landscape mode. Next to the power button are a volume rocker and a tiny, hard-to-press reset button. A MicroSD card slot appears in the far corner.

Up top are the mini-HDMI port and the connector port for charging the tablet and syncing data, and at the right rear are the headphone jack (which doubles as an external microphone input) and a USB port (which will work for input devices such as a mouse, and for flash devices such as memory drives). The front-facing camera is a 1.2-megapixel unit, while the rear-facing camera resolves to 5.0 megapixels.