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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metafor - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
1. The advantages of a companion core apply just as much to single, dual or quad core systems. In each case, individual cores can be power-gated. The companion core is there to provide lower idle power even beyond a single core. So no, going with a dual-core doesn't somehow make a companion core less necessary.2. A15 is huge compared to A9. Huge. Both in area and power. If anything, an A15 SoC needs a companion core even more than anything based on A9.
3. Because A15 is huge, a quad-core in a smartphone form factor isn't very feasible at 32nm. Nor is quad-core really all that useful for the vast majority of use-cases anyway. Especially since A15 performs so much better per-core than an A9.
phantom505 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Yeah, who can put up with a mere 9 hours of continuous playback. It's so bad....Oh wait...
medi01 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
iPad 25 Wh battery.Galaxy Tab 14.8 Wh battery.
;)
thunng8 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Why are you comparing the ipad to the 7" Galaxy tab? Of course the ipad will have a bigger battery.quiksilvr - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I was actually surprised too. To be fair, the A5 chip is huuuuge in the iPad, but that doesn't change the fact that it's still beating a quad core setup.My guess is ICS will optimize quad core capabilities more and we'll be seeing a very different picture once that is released.
So I say wait for ICS and then pass judgement.
vision33r - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
How is it a surprise? Core i5 can match up against Core i7 in 95% if apps without needing the extra cores.In real world test, the difference between Core i5 and i7 performance is hardly measurable.
name99 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Of course by the time ICS is actually available on these sorts of devices, iPad3 with A6 will probably be out...Point is: a "my vaporware can beat up your vaporware" contest is generally not very enlightening to anyone.
daveloft - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
It has nothing to do with the CPU, it's all about the GPU.medi01 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Yeah, iPad wins hands down and it's very practical too.Think about encoding video in a browser using javascript, for instance
metafor - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I think a lot of people (including myself) go with Android because we like the additional features provided by the OS -- true multitasking, choice of a plethora of browsers, third party players, no iTunes, Google integration, etc.But yes, iPad 2 has been king of both performance and battery life for a while now.