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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Mumrik - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I get the feeling Anand didn't enjoy the 39 hour thing :)Btw:
"The resolution is a Honeycomb-standard 1280 x 752. The 16:10 panel measures 10.1-inches diagonally,"
Huh? 1280x752?
That's not a 16:10 resolution...
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
It's technically 1280 x 800, the 752 is what you get when you remove the Honeycomb nav bar.mwildtech - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Great Review Anand! Much better than Engadget's. We are lucky we still got nice sunny skies in Raleigh!SpacemanSpiff13 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Awesome review, Anand. I already had one preordered, but your review makes me really comfortable about my impulse buy, and it's not just a play for page clicks. Really solid, in-depth. Thanks.jwcalla - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
very well done reviewjjj - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Nice to see a decent tablet and glad they didn't dropped (like some nutjobs) the microSD slot.Asus should really sell the keyboard much cheaper would help them gain considerable market share and maybe make one without the battery for 50-70$.And ofc bundle realVNC or Logmein with it.
TrackSmart - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I agree that a cheaper keyboard option (or bundle w/ keyboard) would help sales.Regarding a version without the battery: the thing is already dangerously top-heavy when plugged into the dock. Can you imagine how bad it would be without the weight of the battery in there? They'd probably have to put some kind of weight near the front edge. Or use a design that connects the tablet further inward on the dock, as has been done on other tablets, which would ruin the laptop-like aesthetic (which is pretty nice).
Just my 2 cents.
jjj - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
I was aware of that problem and amusingly enough i was also thinking about the same 2 solutions..The version without battery would be just to bring the price down a lot.The battery costs 20-25$ and that adds 40-70$ to the retail price so it would make a big difference.joe_dude - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Personally, I'm not so interested in comparisons to the iPad. What I really want to know is how it compares to a tablet + netbook/ultrabook/MBA???If it can do a decent job in both roles, then it would really make life easier. Wouldn't need to sync files or deal with two different OSes. Save time and money.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Better than a netbook (what isn't? :-P) but not as good as an ultrabook/MBA for getting actual work done.Take care,
Anand