ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime Review Part II: Battery Life & More
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 15, 2011 3:45 AM ESTFinal Words
I stand by my original conclusion to our Eee Pad Transformer Prime review—this thing is definitely the best Android tablet on the market and it cements ASUS' image as being a company that is good at both engineering and design.
I also stand by my conclusion that the Prime isn't perfect. The Prime definitely needs Ice Cream Sandwich. The hardware upgrades alone are enough to make Honeycomb more than sufficient, but it's clear that we're bumping into the limits of the OS itself—particularly when it comes to multitasking. I am hoping that ICS brings about greater responsiveness in those areas where Honeycomb suffers today. On the bright side, stability is much improved over the initial releases of Google's tablet OS and it's totally usable for netbook style workloads.
ASUS' willingness to rush the launch is still inexcusable, and despite my third review sample working properly I'd like to see evidence that all (or at least the vast majority of) retail samples will be similarly well built. What I'm afraid of is seeing some of the issues I encountered with my first two samples out in the field. I do hope ASUS proves me wrong.
I still need to spend more time with the TF Prime in varied WiFi conditions to get a good feeling for how big of a deal the range limitations are. The fact that ASUS included WiFi antenna diversity in the TF Prime indicates that it knew the aluminum construction was going to be an issue. As to why ASUS didn't opt for a plastic RF window similar to the Apple logo on the iPad, your guess is as good as mine. If all of the retail units behave like mine, however, as long as you're in a place with good WiFi signal you should have no issues with network access on the Prime.
The Prime's aluminum chassis also proved to be a problem for GPS reception. ASUS has since removed GPS support from the Transformer Prime's list of specifications as a result of poor GPS performance. If you're looking for an Android tablet to function as a GPS receiver, the Transformer won't fit the bill.
Power efficiency has been improved by a tangible amount. Battery life is now in the realm of the iPad, whereas before there was a more distinct divide between Honeycomb and iOS tablets. While some may argue that it's disappointing to still see battery life numbers below the iPad 2, at least we finally have something more competitive.
As far as NVIDIA and the Tegra 3 are concerned, this is honestly what the launch platform for Honeycomb should have been. I do have concerns about the SoC's ability to scale to even higher resolutions, but for a 1280 x 800 display Tegra 3 works well. I'm still not sold on the move to four cores, but they aren't a detriment to performance or power consumption so I can't really complain. To be honest, I'd much rather have four A9s than just a higher clocked Tegra 2 so I'm mostly okay with the move. My preference would be for a brand new architecture, but we won't get that until 28nm hits. If Qualcomm can deliver what it's expected to, however, Krait may be a formidable competitor in the not too distant future.
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medi01 - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
It's not about "what is Prime's color gamut", but rather "how does it compare to other tablets".Hopefully it will become standard part of your tests, since brightness/contrast tell only small part of the story.
Ric_Margiotta - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
Thanks for this follow-up article, Anand! It was a good read and answered some of my remaining questions about the TF Prime. Still looking forward to picking one of these up in January!sotoa - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
Too bad these weren't ready in bulk for Christmas. Not to mention ICS.tipoo - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
I read elsewhere that engineering samples of Tegra 3 weren't performing as much better as Nvidia originally expected them to, due to the cores and GPU being constrained for memory bandwidth. I don't know of them changing this in the original design. I'm curious how much ICS will improve T3 performance with its better multithreading and better GPU acceleration, and how much comes down to all the elements competing for bandwidth or some other hardware limitation?druter - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
I guess we should not have expected a non apple slanted review from such a mac fanboy site. I dispair for tech journalism when the point becomes less about an honest unbiased review and more about ones allegiance to apple.Nice try though to sound unbiased though, stating that it is a much improved tablet, your apple bias showed through though when you indicated you felt that it was only in comparison to other Androids and that it was still below anything Mac.
The lesson I learned don't come to Anandtech.com when you want an honest unbiased review.
piiman - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
If you think this is an Apple fan site why do you even come here? Just so you can bash the reviews?tipoo - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
What parts of this came across as biased? To me it seemed all the facts were laid out impartially, and they put effort into correcting the old battery life measurements as well as promised performance updates when ICS hits. If everything comes back to the iPad, its for a reason, like it or not its still the standards bearer for these tablets, and I'm a hardcore Android user. I think the Prime will be better than the iPad personally when ICS hits, but the review is based on current software of course.IKeelU - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
It's important to show how it performs against the iPad, especially with regards to battery life. Most people don't care about android vs iOS, they just want a media consumption device, and will therefore choose the device that allows them to do that better.Second, the numbers for battery life are in Apple's favor. It would be biased to ignore them.
Sounds to me like you would be better served by going to an Android fanboy website.
Belard - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
You are a fool druter. I and others do not know WHAT you think you read or watched.A) Anand isn't much of a tablet user (AFAIK from his previous articles)
B) He uses all kinds of technology - he does have the right to use what he wants for his personal uses, no? He uses AMD and intel for his own servers and in general - has kept standards pretty good on this sight.
C) All devices WILL compare market leaders, including the iPad. With what is on the market TODAY from Samsung, ASUS, Toshiba, etc - None of them have the battery or GPU (graphics) performance of the 9 month old iPad2 and some are below that of an iPad1 especially when it comes to battery life.
D) "below anything mac"?? he didn't compare the TF-Prime to any Mac. Apple only has one type of tablet on the market and its NOT a Macintosh. He stated the simple fact that tablets DO NOT replace actual notebooks. That is true if the iPad2 as well.
E) Use the best tool for the job or personal preference and budget. Simple as that, eh? I build my own desktops, own ThinkPad notebooks and have an iPad. My dislike for apple is the same for Microsoft, so it just doesn't matter.
F) Get over yourself.
melgross - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
Some people aren't happy unless something is reviewed as being much better than any comparable Apple product.Like it or not, the iPad is still the gold standard, and everything is going to be compared to that. This guy will be very unhappy in March when the new one comes out.