ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime Review Part II: Battery Life & More
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 15, 2011 3:45 AM ESTFinal Words
I stand by my original conclusion to our Eee Pad Transformer Prime review—this thing is definitely the best Android tablet on the market and it cements ASUS' image as being a company that is good at both engineering and design.
I also stand by my conclusion that the Prime isn't perfect. The Prime definitely needs Ice Cream Sandwich. The hardware upgrades alone are enough to make Honeycomb more than sufficient, but it's clear that we're bumping into the limits of the OS itself—particularly when it comes to multitasking. I am hoping that ICS brings about greater responsiveness in those areas where Honeycomb suffers today. On the bright side, stability is much improved over the initial releases of Google's tablet OS and it's totally usable for netbook style workloads.
ASUS' willingness to rush the launch is still inexcusable, and despite my third review sample working properly I'd like to see evidence that all (or at least the vast majority of) retail samples will be similarly well built. What I'm afraid of is seeing some of the issues I encountered with my first two samples out in the field. I do hope ASUS proves me wrong.
I still need to spend more time with the TF Prime in varied WiFi conditions to get a good feeling for how big of a deal the range limitations are. The fact that ASUS included WiFi antenna diversity in the TF Prime indicates that it knew the aluminum construction was going to be an issue. As to why ASUS didn't opt for a plastic RF window similar to the Apple logo on the iPad, your guess is as good as mine. If all of the retail units behave like mine, however, as long as you're in a place with good WiFi signal you should have no issues with network access on the Prime.
The Prime's aluminum chassis also proved to be a problem for GPS reception. ASUS has since removed GPS support from the Transformer Prime's list of specifications as a result of poor GPS performance. If you're looking for an Android tablet to function as a GPS receiver, the Transformer won't fit the bill.
Power efficiency has been improved by a tangible amount. Battery life is now in the realm of the iPad, whereas before there was a more distinct divide between Honeycomb and iOS tablets. While some may argue that it's disappointing to still see battery life numbers below the iPad 2, at least we finally have something more competitive.
As far as NVIDIA and the Tegra 3 are concerned, this is honestly what the launch platform for Honeycomb should have been. I do have concerns about the SoC's ability to scale to even higher resolutions, but for a 1280 x 800 display Tegra 3 works well. I'm still not sold on the move to four cores, but they aren't a detriment to performance or power consumption so I can't really complain. To be honest, I'd much rather have four A9s than just a higher clocked Tegra 2 so I'm mostly okay with the move. My preference would be for a brand new architecture, but we won't get that until 28nm hits. If Qualcomm can deliver what it's expected to, however, Krait may be a formidable competitor in the not too distant future.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
58 Comments
View All Comments
metafor - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
Yes. Since Tegra 3 is actually capable of clock-gating individual cores as opposed to all-or-nothing like Tegra 2, power utilization should be better.That in combination with display local dimming and lower voltage -- since the CPU's are made on 40G -- definitely help brings per-core power down.
The question is whether or not the performance is there to compete with SoC's on Android early next year with Samsung's new Exynos and Krait based devices.
TareX - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
Quite off topic, but I expected Anand's Galaxy Nexus review to be out by US launch day...Death666Angel - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
Is it now the norm to compare products based on their size rather than ability and, most importantly, price? A Netbook probably retails for $250-$400. This thing retails for $650 (with dock)? I don't see how this in any way compares to a netbook. Sorry.quiksilvr - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
It isn't fair comparing the two because the ASUS has a 10.1" screen at 1280x800, not a 9.7" screen at 1024x768. Thats a 0.78MP screen vs a 1.0MP screen. It has to render 20% more pixels and on top of that the screen is larger.quiksilvr - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
I'm referring to battery life.Confusador - Thursday, December 15, 2011 - link
Thanks for doing the follow up on this, demonstrating once again why you're the best in the business.Hopefully Asus will learn from this; if you weren't as thorough as you are they would have ended up with their only review here being unnecessarily negative. Maybe they'll give folks more lead time in the future!
fteoath64 - Friday, December 16, 2011 - link
So there is just some improvement and not a great deal of improvement. Wonder if it would be better if Nvidia put two 1.8Ghz cores rather than 4 1.4Ghz core, then the end result in performance would be way better with slight penalty on battery life ?.I guess I have to wait for the A15 cores then!.
Mugur - Friday, December 16, 2011 - link
Asus should've done the impossible and have it ready by Christmas with ICS on it and aggresively priced. It would've been an instant hit.vcarvega - Friday, December 16, 2011 - link
I do think it is commendable of you to update your original review with these updated tidbits. However, I do wonder when it comes to your gripes, particularly with multitasking.I agree with the limitations of Honeycomb's multitasking, but what are we comparing it too? Your review was specifically comparing it to a netbook, so your criticism is fair if we're comparing it to Win XP... but compared to other mobile OS', it's the best on offer (admittedly, I have not tried the Playbook's implementation of multitasking which looks like it may be more comparable to a desktop experience).
Currently, I think heavy users run into serious limitation regardless of which tablet platform they are using. I think I was hoping for quad core to change this as well tho... so that's disappointing. Maybe ICS?
Your comments on higher clocked, dual-core 28nm chips possibly being comparable in performance to Tegra 3 gave me reason to pause as well! Simply b/c I fear that Android 4.0 is still being optimized for dual core devices, not quad core... Because unless things change at CES, most new mobile devices being announced for 2012 still have dual cores!
vision33r - Friday, December 16, 2011 - link
Really bad timing. There are so many phones out right now that makes the Razr look outdated.For starters, this phone doesn't even beat the SSGS2 which came out more than 6 months ago.
Now we have GalaxyNexus Prime, HTC Rezound. Upcoming phones will all have LTE, 720p displays, and better performance.