Android Tablet: Transform Prime Tablet

Thursday 18 October 2012

Transform Prime Tablet

Transformer Prime Tablet

At just 8.3mm, it's thinner than the iPad 2 (8.8mm) and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (8.6mm). There's no cheap plastic on this thing. The back is a solid panel of brushed aluminum—the texture feels slightly off though, to some of us. The result is a very low-profile device that feels incredibly strong (unlike the Galaxy Tabs). It's not quite as comfortable to hold as Motorola's rubberized Xyboard tablets, but the lightness makes up for it.

Right now, the Prime is running Honeycomb (Android 3.2.1). All Honeycomb tablets have had problems with consistency. They're fast one minute, and then slow as hell the next. Not with the Prime. Even when I had ten programs running simultaneously (most of which were HD games) there was virtually no stutter or lag on the homescreen or anywhere else. Nvidia delivered a package of sample HD games that use all four cores and the GPU, and they are absolutely gorgeous. Asus has done some light, (mostly) inoffensive tweaking to the stock Android experience. It adds some extra controls, which are nice, and some software which ranges from useful (Polaris Office) to useless (@vibe Music, a Pandora clone). When it get its Ice Cream Sandwich update, you'll be able to remove anything you don't want, and considering we've already seen ICS running on the Prime, that should be very soon.

NOTE: The reason it's called a Transformer is because it has a spiffy keyboard dock that basically transforms it into a laptop. It has a full keyboard, touchpad, USB and SD card ports, and it adds an extra 50-60% to the battery life, theoretically bringing it up to 15 or 16 hours. But we're not talking about that because we haven't yet received ours. We'll update the review when we get it.