ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime & NVIDIA Tegra 3 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 1, 2011 1:00 AM ESTBattery Life
With 39 hours to test I was pretty limited in what I could do when it came to battery life testing. I was able to run through two tests (one run a piece) and only in one configuration each. I wanted to see how Tegra 3 and the Prime fared in the worst case scenario so I picked the Normal power profile. Over the coming days I'll look at battery life in the other two profiles as well, not to mention run through more iterations of our test suite.
My bigger concern has to do with the malfunctioning WiFi in my review unit. For our video playback battery life test WiFi was on but not actively being used, those numbers should be ok. It's our general use test that loads web pages and downloads emails over WiFi and it's there that I believe things could've suffered a bit.
In both cases I saw around 9 hours of continuous battery life out of the Transformer Prime, without its dock. These numbers are a bit lower than the original Transformer but it's unclear to me how much of this is due to the additional cores/frequency or the misbehaving WiFi. The fact that we're within striking range of the original Transformer with the Prime running in Normal mode tells me that it's possible to actually exceed the Transformer's battery life with the Balanced or Power Saver profiles. That's very impressive for an SoC built on the same manufacturing process as its predecessor but with twice the CPU cores and a beefier GPU.
What I'm not seeing however is the impressive gains in battery life NVIDIA promised its companion core would deliver. I'm not saying that the companion core doesn't deliver a tangible improvement in battery life, I'm just saying that I need more time to know for sure.
That the Transformer Prime can deliver roughly the same battery life as its predecessor without any power profile tweaking may be good enough for many users. Both ASUS and NVIDIA shared their own numbers which peg the Prime's battery life in the 10 - 13 hour range. As I mentioned before, I'll have more data in the coming days.
Update - With a replacement Transformer Prime in house, battery life is looking a lot better already:
Update 2: Even more battery life results in our follow-up.
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steven75 - Saturday, December 3, 2011 - link
If you want the best tablet for your grandmother, shouldn't you be making decisions based on her needs and not yours?SydneyBlue120d - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Anand, do You think the Dual Core Snapdragon S4 will be able to beat the Quad core Tegra3? Thnx :)A5 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
As with any core-based discussion, it depends on what you're doing.tipoo - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Yeah, depends on how well optimized applications are for multicore. In most cases I'd bet a fast dual core would beat a slower quad.tipoo - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
If I'm not mistaken, Honeycomb doesn't have GPU acceleration on all windows by default like ICS will, and ICS will also have better multicore optimization. I'd like to see some benchmarks on the Prime after ICS.HighTech4US - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I second this request.SydneyBlue120d - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Another question: Any info about the audio chip? I mean: Can we expect wolfson Galaxy S quality? Tnx!Willhouse - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Why is the cost drifting up instead of down? The whole appeal of the original transformer was that is was "comparable" in quality but $100 less than other quality tablets. Those of us who are mildly interested in tablets, but can't stomach the costs, aren't going to rush out to buy this even if it is the best android tablet. Is there a large tablet enthusiast market that needs the absolute best hardware at all times?Sorry if this was mentioned - I was immediately outraged and didn't read all the comments.
Roland00Address - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
The Transformer Prime has 32 and 64gb for the internal storage (with micro sd expansion). Note the base model is not 16gb.32gb
499 Transformer Prime
599 Ipad 2
64gb
599 Transformer Prime
699 Ipad 2.
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If you want to get a tegra 2 tablet cheaper than 400 you should be looking at the winter sales on such products, it may not be the asus transformer but it is stlil a tegra 2 honeycomb tablet. No one is going to release a better product cheaper than there old gen, in a cut throat market with decreasing margins unless that product has serious competition.
Kegetys - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Is it correct that it doesn't come with 3G (or 4G) connectivity at all? I'm so used to being able to be connected almost anywhere with both my cellphone and laptop with zero hassle that being restricted to WLAN only would be quite a limitation for a mobile device like this.Also, seriously Asus, why cant you have those beautiful IPS screens available for laptops as well?