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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
204 Comments
View All Comments
PubFiction - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Nope I hate it too.gorash - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I'm not sure if you can hold the thing without it.eddman - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
"Somewhere to put your fingers? pfft ill trade that space for working area and hold it at the edge"Yes, somewhere to put your thumb. Just hold a tablet and you'll know how necessary that is.
MadAd - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
thumb maybe, a slight margin, but not a huge ugly border, how big are your thumbs?the contact area for any touchscreen running windows may need a little bar on the left, small, but tablet desktops arent left justified like windows has been since the wimp revolution..theyre centralised like a phone or a car pc front end
melgross - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
No. It's impossible to use these things without a good size border. .75" seems to be about the. Indium. The Fire has about .5" border around three of the sides, and a number of reviewers have mentioned that it's too easy to touch the screen when holding it, and doing something unintentional.With a phone, you're holding it with one hand wrapped around the back, and up both sides. With a tablet, even a small one, you use one hand with a thumb over the edge. It's too much mental work to keep that thumb from hitting the screen. It even happens with wider borders.
Get used to it.
GnillGnoll - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
The best solution would be to make apps fully resizable, and create a dynamic bezel based on where your hands are. You just need a touch sensor around the edge and back to detect the position of your hands.Commodus - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
No one should ever hire you as an ergonomic designer, then...Many, many times you'll have your thumbs on the front, and even if you didn't have to, it'd be more comfortable. Not the least of which is that it's a lot easier to rotate the tablet when you don't have to hold it gingerly by the edges.
Omega215D - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
If these lawsuits keep up then that may eventually happen...TEAMSWITCHER - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Flippant dislike of Apple product designs makes me laugh. Apple product designers and engineers spend months and sometimes years agonizing over the details of their designs. It's quite unlike any other company on the face of the earth. Your tablet idea for an edge to edge screen simply sucks....I'm glad you don't work for Apple.Omega215D - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
It's not like Apple is the first and only ones to do it. It just depends on what's available at the time, the price point to be met and expectations of the product.I've had several well made players before the iPod came out, and extends to before the iPod Touch.