ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime & NVIDIA Tegra 3 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 1, 2011 1:00 AM ESTFinal Words
Assuming the WiFi and minor dock issue I encountered aren't widespread (ASUS insists they aren't), I am comfortable calling the Eee Pad Transformer Prime the absolute best Android tablet on the market today. The hardware looks and feels great. ASUS picked the best display possible and married it to some really good industrial design. I was impressed with the styling of the Zenbook, and the Prime continues to position ASUS as a purveyor of high quality mobile devices.
At the same time, NVIDIA has finally delivered an SoC capable of delivering the sort of smooth experience we'd expect from a $500 tablet. Honeycomb was a great first attempt by Google at a tablet OS, but Tegra 3 really makes the whole experience complete. Everything you'd expect to be smooth, is finally smooth. Video playback is no longer an issue, the Prime and Tegra 3 can finally play back virtually anything you'd want to throw at it. Thank goodness.
As good as the combination is today, I admit that I still can't wait to put Ice Cream Sandwich on this thing. Even more polish on the OS side (and the absence of any hardware issues during the testing process) would've easily catapulted the Prime into editor's choice territory.
Battery life is the big unknown at this point. At worst it's roughly on par with the old Eee Pad Transformer. I'll know more in the coming days, but 9 hours of continuous use isn't bad. The question is how much better will it be as we start playing with the available power options? I'm also curious to see what having four cores does to web page loading performance. There's clearly an impact on JavaScript rendering, but what about the overall real world experience? In my testing I was limited by the WiFi issue I mentioned earlier, but I hope to have an answer to this soon enough.
The inevitable iPad comparison is, well, inevitable. I still firmly believe there's not a whole lot of iOS/Android cross shopping. If you want an iPad, that's what you should buy. Android isn't an iOS substitute, just as iOS isn't an Android substitute. You can do similar things on both, but personal preference will really determine what suits you the best.
I'll have more coverage on the Prime over the coming days, but if you're making your decision before then: this is the Android tablet to get.
Update: ASUS has removed GPS support from the Prime's official spec sheet. Check out our update here as well as our follow-up to the review.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Thank you, I appreciate the kind words :)Take care,
Anand
cotak - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Everyone seems so impressed but for me the big elephant is why is the GPU slower than the ipad2's from a GPU company? And to boot the CPU performance isn't significantly faster either? What's going on?Death666Angel - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
CPU is pretty fast when you look at multi-core enabled Linpack. Other programs probably don't handle the 4 cores very efficiently.As for the GPU, Apple has been very aggressive in marketing iOS (specifically the iPads) as mobile consoles, so they really delivered in the GPU department. The downside of that is that the die size of the A5 is 122mm² according to Anand (4s review), whereas Tegra3 even with 5 CPU cores only has 80mm² (Tegra3 launched article). :-)
thunng8 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Not sure if they are equivalent tests, but in the ipad2 review, ipad2 scored 170.9 MFLOP which is higher than the Transformer Prime's score of 135.9.I don't think the average consumer cares about how big the die size is, they will however notice the extra GPU performance.
Also, even with the bigger dies size, it doesn't seem to affected battery life either.
Blaster1618 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
GPU:Power VR SGX 543MP2 (iPAD 2) 60 nm
8 Pixel processor * maximum 4 separate address per vector per cycle= 32 addresses per cycle.
Tegra 3 40 nm
12 Pixel processors x 1 separate address per vector=12 addresses per cycle.
Isn't there a secret slot where you can slip in a NV104 processor and give this story a happy ending. Last time I bought an apple was a Apple IIc. (google it), but in this case power's simultaneous multi-threading beats the brawn of 12 processors. (darn). maybe wayne will get smart and 28nm.
vision33r - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
There's nothing to be impressed with. It's another poor attempt by Nvidia to rush a product out the door and getting their ass handed by the iPad2's higher optimized design.How embarrassing to let a 1GHZ dualcore SOC spank a 1.4GHZ quadcore Tegra 3.
I don't know people are excited especially that from what we know of the upcoming Apple's A6 designs and iPad 3 will make this thing forgotten very soon.
GmanMD - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Any idea as to whether you would be able to hook up a 4g wireless usb modem to the dock on this? It would be awesome to have that flexibility.medi01 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I hope one day Anand would stop judging screens only on min/max brightness and would do a proper test, that would also compare gamut.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
That day will come very soon... ;)Take care,
Anand
Toadster - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
how do the these stack up against each other?