ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime & NVIDIA Tegra 3 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 1, 2011 1:00 AM ESTThe Honeycomb Experience
With Ice Cream Sandwich around the corner it's not worth it to spend too much time on Honeycomb, however the first owners of the Transformer Prime will be stuck with Honeycomb. Although NVIDIA has already demonstrated the Prime running ICS, I wouldn't expect to see the ICS update available to end users until January at the earliest. That's assuming there are no unexpected delays or bugs in the process of course.
Honeycomb has matured nicely over the past year and combined with the faster Tegra 3 SoC, the experience is significantly better on the Prime. Everything is a lot smoother and responsive, even compared to an up-to-date vanilla Eee Pad Transformer. ASUS is pretty good about not weighing down the Prime with bloated garbage so the out of the box the experience is pretty good. There's still a hit if you enable live wallpapers but it's not nearly as bad as it was on Tegra 2.
There are still little annoyances that plague the OS. For example, bringing up the task switcher menu isn't always instant, and performance does slow down if you've got some power hungry apps running in the background that need quitting. The build of Honeycomb on the Prime allows you to quit apps from the task switcher menu by tapping the X next to each app. Unfortunately the taps don't always register immediately, leading you to double tap and sometimes unintentionally closing other apps.
Scrolling in the web browser is pretty smooth, there are occasional hiccups but overall the experience is good.
While Honeycomb still has its quirks, Tegra 3 and the Transformer Prime make the experience so much better. Taking a page out of the old WinTel handbook, sometimes the easiest way to solve a software problem is to throw even faster hardware at it. From what I've heard about Ice Cream Sandwich though, it may bring the added polish on the software side that we've been looking for. We'll find out soon enough.
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thunng8 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Not sure about the discrepancies, however, 2.1 is the latest version and it should be the one tested.Also, iOS 5 brought significantly faster openGL drivers, maybe PCWorld were comparing result from a while ago on the ipad2 and iOS4. All onscreen tests are also vsync limited, so the maximum they will ever score is 60fps.
offscreen is somewhat important, as some ipad2 games can render higher output via the HDMI accessory to an external device.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
GLBenchmark 2.1 allows for testing at the same resolution (720p) to enable true apples to apples comparisons of GPUs. There are some slight changes in the workloads as well, so 2.1 numbers aren't directly comparable to 2.0.x numbers.That being said, the iPad 2 should never be slower than the Prime even in an older version of GLBench. I'm not entirely sure what's going on there...
Take care,
Anand
metafor - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
A new version of PowerVR drivers was released some while back (I believe it came with iOS 5) and improved performance dramatically. That may be the issue.GnillGnoll - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
46 fps is an old result on iPad 2. With iOS 5 the Egypt Standard test is almost permanently vsync limited at 60 fps (2.0.3 is gone from the online database, but the workload in the Egypt test hasn't changed between that and 2.1)araczynski - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
if this is supposed to be the next generation of the android tablets, getting slapped around by the ipad2, WHEN THE IPAD3 is 'just around the corner' makes it almost a joke of an upgrade.i don't have any love for apple (pc guy), but i'll be saving my mountain of pennies for an ipad3, rather than bother with an android tablet, have enough random issues with my free DroidX that i couldn't actually image wanting to pay for the 'experience' in a tablet.
vvk - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
If by "around the corner" you meant April or May of the next year than perhaps, based on your needs, you should wait but then if you wait another couple of month you could get the next gen super-duper tablet and so on and so forth. Anyway your life your choice I ain't canceling my preorder based on the Anand's review.gorash - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
No this is not the next generation of Android, next generation is ICS or Jelly Bean. And iPad 3 is coming next summer.steven75 - Saturday, December 3, 2011 - link
Neither iPad was released in the summer.Ketzal - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I'd like to congratulate on a truly superb review. Given the horribly short time you had to write it and do the testing. You did an amazing job.Your reviews are a true breath of fresh air.
The quality of your reviews make the Engadget and like websites look like total amateurs.
Basically it works like this...if you are pondering a new gadget. Wait for your review. If you say it's the one...it's the one. Buy said gadget.
Live happily ever after.
Congrats, I'll be singing your praises to everyone I know.
Ketzal
Wizzdo - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
You should consider getting a low-voltage brain in your next life since Anand does your thinking for you. This way your battery might last as long as the iPad2's.Anand may be good but regardless of his reviews "Happily ever after" is about 6 months in this industry.