Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime (Nvidia Tegra 3 Processor; 10.1-inch display)

As the first device to use Nvidia's new Tegra 3 quad-core mobile processor, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is, arguably, the tablet to beat when it comes to raw computing power. But performance is not the sole criterion for judging a slate. How does Asus' latest tablet fare when it comes to other factors such as design and features? We find out.

The short answer is that the Transformer Prime is undoubtedly the best Android tablet now. The hardware is impeccable, even if you exclude the much-touted Tegra 3 chip. From the solidity and finish of its aluminum chassis to the excellent viewing angles on its IPS panel, the Transformer Prime exudes class, though we did have some reservations about the battery life. The optional dock morphs this tablet into something akin to an Asus Zenbook with lower performance, but a significantly longer battery life.

However, the Prime is not perfect. We experienced the all-too-familiar shortcomings of Android Honeycomb, with the occasional stutters that are all the more glaring when you consider its quad-core insides. The Prime may also be ahead of its time: One is unlikely to find optimized apps that tax its four cores anytime soon.

While the latest update from Asus US indicates that the Transformer Prime will ship sometime next week, Asus Singapore has confirmed on its Facebook page that the tablet will only be available in Singapore in January. You may wish to check with the Asus representative for your country on launch and pricing details.

A minor consolation is that due to this delay, it will come preloaded with Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0). At this moment, we don't have any launch prices for the Transformer Prime in this region, but the tablet is listed in North America at US$499 for the 32GB Wi-Fi model and US$599 for the 64GB version. The dock costs an additional US$149.

Design

While the original Transformer has a plastic chassis, the Transformer Prime is made of aluminum. The back of the tablet has an attractive concentric circle finish similar to Asus' Ultrabook series, the Zenbook. Unlike the silver Zenbooks, the Transformer Prime is available in two colors--amethyst gray and champagne gold. We received the amethyst gray version, which means that the aluminum back is a mix of purple and gray. 

Despite the switch to aluminum, Asus has managed to make the Prime about 100g lighter than the first Transformer. The new tablet comes in at 586g, which is marginally lighter than the iPad 2, and the Prime is also fractionally slimmer than its main competitors at 8.3mm thick.

The Prime has a smooth, sloped back with rounded corners that felt comfortable to hold. The left side of the back was slightly warm during video playback, but it didn't get too hot even after hours of use. At the upper left corner, there's a small power button that could have been a bit larger--we often found ourselves searching for it. Also on the left is the volume rocker, micro-HDMI and microSD slots. At the bottom, you'll find the 40-pin connector for the included adapter for charging or syncing with a PC. It also connects to the optional keyboard dock. The speaker grille is on the right, along with a 3.5mm audio jack. Two microphone pinholes are located at the top and left respectively.

Specifications as reviewed	Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime
Price	US$499
Processor	Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor
Memory	1GB
Storage	32GB
Graphics	Nvidia Tegra 3
Operating system	Android 3.2.1
Dimensions (W x D)	263 x 180.8mm
Height	8.3mm
Screen size (diagonal)	10.1-inch (1,280 x 800-pixel) touchscreen
System weight	586g (tablet), 1.12kg (with dock)
Category	Slate

If you're getting the keyboard dock, you should know it adds half a kilo to the tablet. You'll get a proper trackpad, full-sized USB port and an SD card reader in exchange, along with the promise of adding six more hours of battery life. When connected to the keyboard dock, the tablet will first draw power from the dock's battery.

The keyboard itself resembles something that you'll find on an Asus Netbook. The twist is that Windows-specific keys have been replaced with Android ones such as Home and Search buttons. There are also useful shortcuts to control the volume, Wi-Fi and other common functions found on laptop keyboards. Key travel is shallow and not too dissimilar from an Asus Zenbook.

When the tablet is docked, the entire setup is almost exactly like a notebook. Due to the weight of the tablet half, it feels top-heavy and you'll need to keep your palms on the ketyboard for balance. The other criticism is that we couldn't wake the tablet from sleep mode using the keyboard alone--we had to click the power button on the tablet, which breaks the illusion of using a laptop. Do note that you can't use the keyboard dock of the older Transformer with the new version or vice versa.

Features

The 10.1-inch display on the Prime has a 1,280 x 800-pixel resolution that's typical for its size. What's different is the brightness of the panel--it has an outdoor mode that cranks up the brightness to 600 nits to make reading in sunny environments easier. While the extra brightness helps slightly, it won't magically make the Prime readable in direct sunlight. The brighter screen will also run the battery down at a faster rate.

On the bright side, the Prime's display has excellent viewing angles that seem to surpass that on the Asus Zenbook. The glossy display will still pick up fingerprints, even with the addition of an oleophobic coating. However, the gap between the Corning Gorilla Glass outer layer and the actual IPS panel on the Prime appears smaller compared with the previous model. In short, this is one of the best displays we have seen on a tablet.

Another major improvement is in the camera department, notably, the presence of an 8-megapixel rear shooter. This camera, which is capable of 1080p video recording, even comes with an LED flash and a F2.4 aperture. The 1.2-megapixel front camera isn't too shoddy either. Although we aren't sold on the idea of taking pictures with a tablet, you can't fault Asus for not providing users with the tools here.

Of course, the highlight of the Transformer Prime is its Tegra 3 chip. This is the first quad-core mobile processor to be released and the Prime is currently the only device to use it. With the majority of smartphones and tablets using single and dual-core processors, there aren't too many apps that benefit from the Tegra 3 chip. Our review unit comes preloaded with a number of these apps, including Riptide, Bladeslinger and Shadowgun.

While some of these games are already available, you'll get additional visual effects such as dynamic lighting and motion blur with a Tegra 3 device. These graphical features will not be available if the game detects older, less-capable hardware. The games can be found on Nvidia's Tegra Zone, which you can download from the Android Market.

The other selling point of Tegra 3 is improved power consumption--Nvidia claims it is up to 61 percent less than Tegra 2. In fact, the Transformer Prime comes with three power profiles--Normal, Balanced and Power saving. In Normal mode, the Tegra 3 processor runs at a top speed of 1.3GHz with all four cores active. If only a single core is being used, this goes up to 1.4GHz. Balanced mode reduces the highest frequency to 1.2GHz while Power saving brings the clock speeds even lower, especially when more cores are used (it also dims the screen slightly). For less intensive tasks such as browsing the Web or video playback, the tablet will automatically default to using a fifth, companion core, which is supposed to consume even less power. 

Tegra 3 also supports game controllers for consoles such as the Wiimote and the wireless DualShock 3 PlayStation 3 controller. While the scenario offered by Nvidia involves connecting the Transformer Prime to an HDTV and using a game controller to play Android games on the big screen, we don't see it being commonly used for this.

	Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime	Average for category (Tablet)
Ports	Micro-HDMI	N.A
Expansion	microSD card reader	microSD card reader
Connectivity	802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth	802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, HSDPA
GPS	Yes	Yes
Camera	1.2 megapixels (front), 8 megapixels (rear)	Yes
Other features	Accelerometer, light sensor, gyroscope, E-compass	Accelerometer, light sensor

Besides its quad-core processor, the Transformer Prime starts with twice the amount of internal storage as its predecessor at 32GB. There's also a 64GB version while the microSD card slot allows users to expand this amount even further. Connectivity options currently are Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, though other typical tablet features such as an accelerometer, light sensor and gyroscope are included. Audio performance was adequate coming from the single speaker grille but it's located where your palms would be if you're holding the tablet with both hands in landscape mode and it will be slightly muffled.

Our Transformer Prime comes with Android Honeycomb installed, though this tablet is expected to get an update to Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) by the end of the year. In the meantime, Asus did add some custom tweaks to the default Android interface. For instance, there's a new Recent Apps onscreen button next to the Home button, which is similar to what Lenovo has implemented on its IdeaPad tablet. Holding down this button also does a screen capture, which is a feature that's solely missing from Honeycomb (it will be present by default on Ice Cream Sandwich).

You can toggle between the three power profiles available on the Prime via the Quick Settings menu at the bottom right corner of the interface. There's also an option here to enable the Super IPS+ mode that increases the brightness of the screen. A handy Asus utility is its File Manager, which is now integrated into the Quick Settings tool.

We found the improved File Manager to be extremely useful--you can easily browse the contents of the built-in flash memory, a microSD card (or even an attached USB flash drive if the tablet is connected to the keyboard dock) and perform typical file operations. The integration of this tool with other Asus utilities such as its DLNA streaming software, MyNet, increases its usefulness--for instance, you can easily copy files from a PC on the same network to the tablet. Compared with the previous versions of these apps on the first Transformer, they now feel more like an integrated set of tools rather than separate apps that don't work with each other.

Other preloaded apps include SuperNote, which, as its name suggests, is a note-taking app and Polaris Office, which is an office productivity app that recognizes Microsoft Office formats. You'll also get up to 8GB of cloud storage with Asus MyCloud and access the uploaded files from any device with Internet access.

Model/Specifications	Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime	Apple iPad 2 (Wi-Fi)	Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Display	10.1-inch (1,280 x 800)	9.7-inch (1,024 x 768)	10.1-inch (1,280 x 800)
Connectivity	802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth	802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth	802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G
RAM	1GB	512MB	1GB
Ports	Micro-HDMI, SD card	N.A	N.A
Storage	32GB	16GB	32GB
Operating system	Android 3.2.1	iOS 5.0.1	Android 3.1
Weight	586g	601g	565g
Price	US$499	S$668 (US$499)	S$848 (US$657)

The Transformer Prime weighs slightly less than the iPad 2 and it is the thinnest among the three tablets compared here. However, the plastic-clad Galaxy Tab 10.1 remains the lightest. While both the iPad 2 and Galaxy Tab have 3G versions, Asus only has a Wi-Fi-enabled Transformer Prime at the moment, though like its predecessor, we expect the manufacturer to release a 3G edition later. In terms of storage and memory, the Prime is tied with the Tab (and has twice that of the iPad 2). It is also the only slate here with micro-HDMI and SD card support.

Performance And Battery Life

According to Nvidia, the Tegra 3 chip has up to three times the graphical performance of Tegra 2, so the Transformer Prime should have no issues with even the most graphically taxing games on the Android platform. While we didn't have issues with gaming performance, we found that even a quad-core processor won't help with the UI lags that plague the Android operating system. When everything's fine, the screen transitions are fluid and snappy. Apps also launch faster than usual. Then there are those jarring moments when it doesn't feel like a powerful high-end tablet: The stuttering encountered when scrolling a Webpage for example. 

Earlier, we mentioned the three power profiles on the Transformer Prime. Depending on the apps used, the different clock frequencies for these profiles will have some impact on performance. For instance, in the SunSpider Javascript benchmark which tests Javascript rendering performance, we found that in Normal mode, the Prime beat other competing Android tablets such as the Galaxy Tab 10.1 by around 27 percent. However, in Power saving mode, the performance of the Transformer Prime was roughly equal to the Tab.

We tested the battery life of the Transformer Prime alone by looping a standard-definition video from its internal storage till it shut down. We muted the audio and disabled the Wi-Fi while screen brightness was adjusted to 50 percent. Since the Prime comes with three different power profiles, we decided to try the Balanced and Power Saving modes, which should be more than sufficient for video playback.

The Prime lasted around 6 hours and 22 minutes in Balanced mode while switching to Power Saving extended this to around 7 hours. Given such numbers, we believe that Normal will definitely lead to even less uptime. Compared with the almost 9 hours on the first Transformer, these results were somewhat disappointing. We'll be checking these numbers again with the dock's battery life and Ice Cream Sandwich update in the near future.

Service And Support

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime comes with a one-year international warranty. On its support Web site, you can download user manuals, drivers and software patches. Technical support is available via phone, email and online chat, though in case of hardware failure the unit has to be brought to a service center for repair.