ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime & NVIDIA Tegra 3 Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 1, 2011 1:00 AM ESTBattery Life
With 39 hours to test I was pretty limited in what I could do when it came to battery life testing. I was able to run through two tests (one run a piece) and only in one configuration each. I wanted to see how Tegra 3 and the Prime fared in the worst case scenario so I picked the Normal power profile. Over the coming days I'll look at battery life in the other two profiles as well, not to mention run through more iterations of our test suite.
My bigger concern has to do with the malfunctioning WiFi in my review unit. For our video playback battery life test WiFi was on but not actively being used, those numbers should be ok. It's our general use test that loads web pages and downloads emails over WiFi and it's there that I believe things could've suffered a bit.
In both cases I saw around 9 hours of continuous battery life out of the Transformer Prime, without its dock. These numbers are a bit lower than the original Transformer but it's unclear to me how much of this is due to the additional cores/frequency or the misbehaving WiFi. The fact that we're within striking range of the original Transformer with the Prime running in Normal mode tells me that it's possible to actually exceed the Transformer's battery life with the Balanced or Power Saver profiles. That's very impressive for an SoC built on the same manufacturing process as its predecessor but with twice the CPU cores and a beefier GPU.
What I'm not seeing however is the impressive gains in battery life NVIDIA promised its companion core would deliver. I'm not saying that the companion core doesn't deliver a tangible improvement in battery life, I'm just saying that I need more time to know for sure.
That the Transformer Prime can deliver roughly the same battery life as its predecessor without any power profile tweaking may be good enough for many users. Both ASUS and NVIDIA shared their own numbers which peg the Prime's battery life in the 10 - 13 hour range. As I mentioned before, I'll have more data in the coming days.
Update - With a replacement Transformer Prime in house, battery life is looking a lot better already:
Update 2: Even more battery life results in our follow-up.
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joe_dude - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Sorry Anand, but could you clarify what you mean by "getting actual work done"?I don't expect the Transformer Prime to be running Photoshop (although Photoshop Touch is available?) or any intense apps. But is it a "good enough" laptop for a general user?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Browsing the web is still faster on an MBA/ultrabook, pages load quicker, you can open multiple tabs and load them in the background more effectively - you can switch between tasks quicker (cmd+tab/alt+tab is still infinitely more responsive than what you get with Honeycomb's task switcher). You can get writing done on both, but multitasking and being productive is just easier on a MBA/ultrabook.Now both of those comparisons are ~2x the price of the Prime. Compared to a netbook, I'd definitely get the Prime.
Take care,
Anand
agt499 - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Alt-tab was one of many things that impressed with my OG transformer -you don't use the honeycomb task switcher because you just alt-tab with the keyboard!I have to say asus really get it on that: I don't know for sure if it's asus or google , but the others that warm by keyboard-loving heart are ctrl-t for a new tab in browser and ctrl-w to close a tab.
Also re zooming, I can't speak for the prime, but the original will pinch-zoom with the touchpad.
Thanks for the great review -got to find an excuse to upgrade now!
(you're still right about an ultrabook but it feels like asus are so close...)
twotwotwo - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
Ahaha -- I managed to use my Transformer all this time lamenting the lack of keyboard-based task switching but without actually trying Alt-Tab, which of course should be the first thing to try. Thank you, agt499.twotwotwo - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I have an original Transformer that I've used as my work machine a few days, and I also used a netbook as my only machine for six months. Transformer's very much a tablet and not a computer, because of Honeycomb. The bad task switching and other annoyances -- different text-editing shortcuts, lack of a full Docs app, lag editing paragraphs in the browser, etc. -- mean it's fine for the reading/consumption that folks do on tablets (and better for e-mail, chat, some writing or notetaking, and SSH if you do that) but, for me, it's worse than even a netbook at other stuff.If you're thinking of it for tablet-y (or mostly tablet-y) uses it's a slam dunk: it's a tablet, great screen, mobile OS, monster battery life even vs. netbooks.
If you want a computer, you want a computer. Besides netbooks and ultrabooks, there's the Core i3 ULV x121e (and others like it soon, I hope) in the middle.
joshv - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Why exactly don't we expect these sorts of machines to be running photoshop? Very complex versions of photoshop ran just fine on single core P6's with a 1024x768 monitor.Now we have four GHz+ cores, CPU speed really can't be much of an issue. Screen realestate might be, but that's manageable with alternate layouts.
metafor - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I think the biggest limitation with programs like Photoshop on small form-factor devices -- including ultrabooks -- is the display resolution. Now granted, for a lot of simple photo editing, that won't matter -- and in fact, that's what Photoshop Touch is for -- but for more professional level content, the displays may just be too small and low-resolution to get the job done.But you're right, the processing power is there nowadays.
anactoraaron - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
I always assumed it was an x86 issue. Since there's no x86 support in these devices Adobe will not re-write/compile the software - kinda like how it took years to have a native x64 flash player (and not a x86 kinda running in an x64 browser).I would think it's simply a matter of laziness/unwillingness (profit margin?) on Adobe's part.
metafor - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Photoshop Touch and a suite of other tools is coming to Android within a month or so. Adobe wants to grasp opportunities; but just porting a mouse-and-keyboard application to Android isn't the way to go about it.ctrlbrk - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link
Anand, thank you. I have been eyeing this tablet for a long time now.I want to know your impressions of how it feels in your hands, weight wise? For bedroom surfing, email, youtube, etc -- but not movie watching -- is the 10.1 too big and too heavy? Is it better to get something like the Galaxy Tab 8.9?