The Asus Transformer Book T100 is an inexpensive Windows tablet with a 10 inch display and a keyboard based that lets you use it like a laptop. Thanks to an Intel Z3740 Bay Trail processor the device gets long battery life while offering laptop-like performance.

But if you’re not a fan of Windows, you’re not necessarily stuck with it. As of late October, 2013 it’s a bit of a pain in the neck trying to run an alternate operating system on the Transformer Book T100 — but it’s possible.

We recently showed you how to boot a semi-functional build of Ubuntu Linux on the tablet. Now developer paperWastage has also figured out how to boot Google Android on the tablet.

Android on the Asus Transformer Pad T100

The process is pretty complicated and requires 2 USB flash drives, a USB-OTG cable, and a bit of patience.

Basically what you need to do is prepare a bootable USB flash drive with an x86-compatible version of Android and a version of the GRUB bootloader that the tablet will recognize.

Then you can choose Android at the boot menu and load Google’s touchscreen-friendly operating system. You just might not be able to run it very well — paperWastage reports Android is very slow and unstable, and not generally usable in its current state. But at least it boots.

If you’re looking for an easier way to run Android apps on an Asus Transformer Book T100 you can try installing BlueStacks, a free app that lets you run Android apps on a Windows or Mac computer.

bluestacks t100

BlueStacks can be a bit sluggish too, but it does allow you to access apps that wouldn’t otherwise be available for Windows 8 tablets, including the Android Google Play Music and Play Movies apps.

google play movies T100

It can take a long time to load those apps — and sometimes actions which take one tap on an Android phone or tablet require a double-tap on the Asus T100 with BlueStacks. But once the apps are up and running, they work smoothly. I was able to watch a bit of movie using Google Play Movies today, and play a little Robot Unicorn Attack on the tablet.

rua

The movie looked good, the game looked like it was dropping frames. Results will probably vary depending on the Android apps you’re trying to run.

 

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19 replies on “Android on the Asus Transformer Book T100 (work in progress)”

  1. im a developer, will this t100 able to install any programs? such like eclipse and java?

  2. Hi, is it possible to use ther ROM of a Asus T103c to run Android on a Asus T100 ? It is from the prinip the same devie. I think it has the same hardware. It has a dual core bay trail cpu and it is from Asus optimised.

    Ogogerd

  3. I used Bluestack initially but found it to be too sluggish. Tried android SDK and few other. Didn’t work. Finally came across Windroy and am stuck with it for now until something better comes up. Hopefully!

  4. Android Appstorm ran an article about doing this with GenyMotion a few weeks back, it seemed fairly stable, but I’d be interested to see how it works on this device. It might even sway me to trade up from my hp slatebook.

  5. I have been using one for about a week as a tablet and a notebook. Right away ASUS pushed out a platform update. One thing it did was get the WINDOWS key working. I have been running some of my STEAM games to check performance. Half-Life 2 is OK. I’m going to try FEAR 3 next. I installed BLUESTACKS. My Android phone apps seem to work OK. I plan to do an image backup of the complete SSD and then reclaim the 8 GB recovery partition for primary storage. I used the Bluetooth with a mouse and it was no problem, better than my HP Windows 7 notebooks. The WiFi performance is very good. The keyboard is a little tight but the key action feels very nice.

    1. Genymotion runs considerably better than Bluestacks but doesn’t support native multi-touch which is extremely limiting. Seems a bit pointless simulating a two fingered touch with the right mouse button on a machine with actual 5 finger touch screen.

  6. Can you make a video showing bluestacks? Also I want to see how iTunes runs on a tablet.

  7. Can you see its sluggishness after you set the power settings to high performance?

  8. Thanks for insight about this product! I’m really interested and recommending it to all my friends. Sadly I can’t afford it but is very good to see so many people interested! 🙂

  9. The sluggishness may be due to GPU acceleration support, one of the trouble spots for Android-x86 unless you have a GPU that the project has gotten open source code to work with. I’m also surprise that this guy hasn’t tried setting Android’s DPI down to 120 or so to shrink fonts and icons a bit for a better experience. The default is something like 160 DPI, better suited to a tablet.

    1. He’s only been at it for a few days, and he’s already managed to boot both Ubuntu and Android… I’m sure there are plenty of other things he’ll try doing to improve performance in the coming days and weeks.

      Personally, I decided to give Bluestacks a try rather than following his instructions for booting a largely unusable version of Android. 🙂

      Eventually I’ll have to get around to writing a detailed review of this tablet and send it back to Asus. For now I’m just having fun testing its limits.

      1. It’ll be interesting to see what you think of BlueStacks. It didn’t work well at all for me. I got the impression it was somehow optimized for use on AMD CPU machines, maybe the ARM emulator it uses?

        1. It’s moderately usable. If there’s an Android app you absolutely have to run, it’ll do. But you’re going to get a better user experience with native Windows apps.

          1. Alas, there never has been bejeweled blitz. I find that Facebook games work sometimes well and then die and u have to reboot. Bluestacks is not going to get me around this. I like e-sword on it. Bejeweled 3 is nice but I like playing blitz with my Facebook pals.

      2. It won’t even install here. I’ve gone through their help forums and tried their suggestions and the installer still aborts quickly. My guess is they’re using .Net or something (.Net is irreparably broken on this PC, and Microsoft’s answer is “reinstall Windows” since you can’t uninstall/reinstall .Net starting with Vista).

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