Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF201 Review

1. Introduction2. Hardware Tour - Front3. Hardware Tour - Back4. Hardware Tour - Sides5. Keyboard Dock - Tour6. Keyboard Dock - Experience7. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich8. Web Browser9. Touchscreen Keyboard, Other Applications10. The Camera and its Quality11. Hardware Performance Tests12. Browser Performance Tests13. Battery Life14. Closing Thoughts15. View All Pages

Asus surprised everyone with the aptly Transformer tablet in early 2011 which combined a 10.1 inch Android tablet and a dock that added a keyboard straight out of a netbook and a battery pack for valued battery life. Since then Asus announced the successor to the original TF101 Transformer and gives us the what is today known as the Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF201. So is it the Prime cut of meat we love to devour?

The Asus Transformer Prime was the first device to launch that ran Nvidia's Tegra 3 mobile system-on-chip solution and surprisingly is still one of the only devices shipping with the quad core processor. The most notable other device being the HTC One X smartphone.

Keeping things running smoothly behind the show include a full gigabyte of RAM, a ULP GeForce GPU and either 32 or 64 GB of internal storage. The tablet is available in “amethyst gray” and “champagne gold” colour schemes; we reviewed the champagne gold, 64 GB SKU. Price-wise, the 32 GB models will set you back £499.99, which includes the keyboard dock.

Software wise, the Prime launched with Android 3.2 Honeycomb and was the first Android device of great interest to get updated to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Endless specifications on paper will only get teach you so much however, so I advise you read onwards.

Key Specifications:

• 10.1 inch Super IPS+ 1280 x 800 capacitive touchscreen display
• 10 finger multi-touch support plus Corning's Gorilla Glass
• Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset
• 1.3 GHz quad core ARM CPU with a ULP GeForce GPU
• 1 GB of RAM
• 32 GB or 64 GB (reviewed) of internal storage plus a MicroSD slot
• Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich
• 8 MP rear facing camera with F2.4 aperture and LED flash
• 1080p video recording
• 1.2 MP front facing camera
• WLAN 802.11 b/g/n
• Bluetooth V2.1+EDR
• Micro HDMI port
• 25Wh Li-Polymer battery
• Weighs in at 586 grams
• Just 8.3mm thick, full dimensions are 263 × 180.8 × 8.3mm

The 586 gram Prime feels really good in your hands, with emphasis on the plural of hands here. A 10.1 inch tablet is just too large to operate with one hand unless you are holding it to read a book or webpage. It also feels really thin in hand and not just because of its 8.3mm thickness, while this helps greatly, the edges are also tapered off to meet the front of the tablet.

Up front keeping things interesting is the 10.1 inch Super IPS+ display. The capacitive touchscreen is capable of 10 finger multi-touch and has Corning's Gorilla Glass keeping things scratch free. Although the strengthened glass front is rather attracted to fingerprints, the front of the Prime can be cleaned by a microfibre cloth or if you don't have one on hand, a damp tissue will do the trick.

Looking at the 1280 by 800 resolution display's capabilities, colours are vibrant and saturated without being over-saturated at all. Viewing angles are near perfect as well, we did not notice colours inverting at all, even when viewed from extreme and completely unrealistic viewing angles.

Part of the Super IPS+ display benefits is a generous brightness boost to over 600 nits, making the Prime a lot more usable in sunlight. In fact, the only place I can genuinely complain about the Prime's display is it's resolution. While the 1280 x 800 resolution is currently standard compared to most other tablets a whole collection of Full HD tablets are going to flood the market later this year, including Asus' own Pad Infinity.

Where the Transformer Prime has a PPI count of 149, Full HD tablets will step it up to 224 PPI, a marked improvement (assuming 10.1 inch tablets remain standard). While pixelation can be seen if you look close enough, the High Definition resolution and viewing distance really does the trick to avoid any complaints. For comparison's sake a 23 inch 1080p desktop monitor has a PPI count of 96.

Surrounding the four sides of the display is a bezel that is a constant 22mm thick. Along the top edge is where the 1.2 MP front facing webcam is located slightly off-centre. A bit to the left of this is where the light sensor hides. In the top left corner of the display is a simple Asus badge.

If you are wondering where all the hardwired Android buttons are they are non-existent on the vast majority of Android tablets. Instead you have to rely on software buttons which definitely has its own drawbacks.

The rear of the Transformer Prime is home to a metallic circular pattern which is available in both “amethyst gray” and “champagne gold” colours. We had the champagne gold edition and the person that named the colours should be fired. The back casing doesn't live up to its naming and is a light grey colour with the faintest of gold tints.

It should be said that the aluminum can be scratched rather easily. While the front has a full Gorilla Glass casing the aluminum back is left exposed. We're not sure how many other reviewers have got their hands on our unit before us but there is quite a collection of small hairline scratches that are very obvious under the right lighting.

Although if you ever get stranded in the desert, the Prime's rear casing will act as a wonderful visual signalling tool.

The centre of the aluminum back is occupied by a Asus badge while above it is the 8 MP rear facing camera. It isn't a cheap sensor either, possessing an impressive F2.4 aperture plus a LED flash for better shots in poor lighting. Video is able to be recorded at Full High Definition 1080p resolution.

The single speaker is located in just about the most bizarre place possible, right where your right hand will mostly likely be when the Prime is used in a landscape orientation. Surprisingly the speaker is difficult to drown out completely using your palm and in general use you will only suffer a minor muffling effect at worst, at best, you won't even notice the strange placement of the speaker.

More positively, the speaker itself does sound wonderful and is easily loud enough to enjoy a movie in a lounge where there is some degree of background chatter.

The sides of Transformer Prime have an brushed aluminum finish and are separated from the aluminum backing of the tablet. Along the top edge of the Prime is (assuming the tablet is docked in the keyboard accessory) where the rather small power button is located on the far left side. I must admit that it can be pretty awkward to press although you do get used to it after a few days of use.

Implanted within the power button is also a small LED light, unfortunately its only two functions is to shine orange whilst charging and green when fully charged. There is also one of the microphones located directly above the light sensor on the top edge.

Along the left edge is where the vast majority of ports are found, from top to bottom, the two stage volume rocker, Micro HDMI port, MicroSD card slot and the other microphone pinhole.

The volume rocker does its job well enough and gives the same tactile feedback as the power button. It is neither too stiff or loose, preventing accidental presses as well as making it easy enough to adjust the volume.

The bottom edge is where Asus' proprietary connectivity and charging port is found in the centre. Sadly, you have to plug the tablet into the AC adapter to charge it, plugging it into your PC will only allow for the transfer of files.

There is also two slots that are used to secure the keyboard dock. These two slots are a bit disappointing though, I wish Asus had made some kind of cover for these ports as they take away from the otherwise magnificent design of the tablet.

Finally, the 3.5mm headphone jack is found two thirds of the way up the right edge.

Included by default with the Transformer Prime is Asus' keyboard dock accessory. The dock is just 8mm at the front edge, up-sizing slightly to 10.4mm at the back edge. It combines a 22Wh battery, a basic touchpad, a keyboard straight from a netbook and a plethora of Android specific buttons.

There is also a full size SD card slot and a full size USB 2.0 port, which was able to spin up a Western Digital 2.5 inch portable hard disk drive. Again we see the proprietary connector to charge the dock’s battery and then the tablet itself (only through AC) plus add data connectivity. There is also a small orange LED by this port to indicate the dock is being charged, it then turns green once fully charged, just like the one embedded in the power button.

The Android specific buttons lay mostly above the number row and include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and brightness toggles. There are also screenshot, device settings, media, volume and browser buttons. The browser button directs you to the stock browser even if you have another browser like Chrome or Opera installed.

Also included are home, search and menu buttons. You can also Alt-Tab between recently active applications, although there is no Alt button on the left side of the keyboard. Making it a job for a two hands.

There is also a button that locks and turns off the display, it will also unlock the display if you have no lockscreen security such as a pattern or PIN. Sadly however it does not wake the display, but tapping the touchpad or clicking the associated button does wake the display – but this functionality strangely disappears after the tablet has been dormant for about 30 seconds.

The Prime is attached to the keyboard dock by sliding it into mechanism that links the data and charging connections, this is then secured by two metal locks. This additional security while using the tablet in laptop mode does come at the expense of two open ports in the base of the tablet.

Luckily, Asus have implemented a degree of forward thinking here and included two rubber plugs that insert into these slots. While they are easy to insert, they are impossible to remove by hand. If you often like to mix it up between tablet and netbook mode you will be forced to live without the rubber plugs. These things were also be inherently easy to lose.

You detach the tablet by flipping the docking latch and pulling the tablet out of and away from the dock.

As you might expect, you can fold the display down to protect the display. However, opening it again requires the use of finger tips to pry it open. On the plus side, the display automatically turns on when you do manage to get it open.

The use of a keyboard is going to multiply your WPM and accuracy by many magnitudes over any keyboard on the touchscreen. Much of this review was actually written using the Prime’s keyboard dock, and throughout this time it was obvious that the software is left lacking compared to the hardware. I changed word processing software more than the number of times the tablet went in and out of the dock.

Typing on the keyboard does take some getting used to, about three or four days for me personally. You will also likely find your typing habits changing due to the tiny right Shift key, on top of the effects of the smaller keyboard. I soon found my fingers hovering above the keys rather than having them waiting for orders on the keys.

I found that my WPM using this test drops from about 85 using my Microsoft Sidewinder X4 keyboard drops to 65 WPM on the keyboard dock. I am more than certain that the difference would be a lot more noticeable if the test involved capitals and punctuation.

When the tablet is attached to the keyboard dock, the device is rather top heavy and as a result it doesn't take a lot to knock the tablet onto its back. This is something that could be easily fixed by moving the centre of gravity towards the touchpad. The other solution being, which I would prefer, is for Asus to pack in some more cells to make the dock outweigh the tablet.

The dock weighs 537 grams while the tablet weighs 586 grams. In real life usage though, considering my wrists were more often than not leaning on the front of the dock it really did not bother me at all, but it is something to be aware of, especially if you plan on using the dock as a stand of sorts.

When the tablet is pushed as far back in the dock as possible so that the display is angled upwards more the docking mechanism actually lifts the tablet up a bit, slanting the keyboard. This is one thing that Asus have clearly thought about, however you cannot push the tablet back further than about 100 degrees in relation to the keyboard's surface.

At the end of the day with a Transformer Prime, don’t expect your tablet to become a very productive device just because it has a keyboard dock. While the hardware is now surpassing the experience of a netbook, the actual software experience is left lacking for a productive lifestyle. Guess what sold computers back in the 1980s and early 90s? All I can say is that is wasn’t strictly hardware.

Android still has a fair way to go before catching up to Windows but improvements made in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and a recent update that has made Google Docs more tablet friendly has improved Google's own services. Hopefully Google Drive will further improve the productivity experience on Android tablets.

Software Overview

The Asus Transformer Prime originally launched with Android 3.2 Honeycomb back in December of last year and was then one of the first devices to get upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. This makes Asus one of the best manufacturers of Android devices when it comes to software updates. In fact, as soon as the initial setup was complete it was already downloading a firmware update for me.

Asus has not messed that with the Primes user interface. All they have added to the stock Android experience is some of their own useful widgets (see above) and a tab for some Asus customised settings.

Lockscreen

A lockscreen is a lockscreen, and unlike what HTC does on their Sense skin the lockscreen serves no real productive purpose other than being a layer of security.

By default the lockscreen security termed as slide is enabled, which enables you to quickly unlock the Prime or launch the camera application. You can also disable lockscreen security entirely or use a pattern, PIN or password to secure your tablet.

You are able to encrypt all of your data using a numeric PIN or password, which you’ll need to enter on start up to unencrypt your data. Forget this and you’ll have to wipe every piece of data on the tablet.

The notification overlay can be accessed from the lockscreen now, something that is new in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and is a big step forward.

Homescreens

Once your top of the line tablet has been unlocked you are presented with five homepages, each of which has a 8 by 7 grid to hold all of your favourite widgets and application shortcuts. You cannot add more, or take away homescreens.

The series of dots in the top right corner takes you to the application drawer. Part of me wishes there was a way that could allow you to access the application drawer from where the rest of the Android navigation buttons are – permanently in the bottom left of the display.

The other functions found in the bottom left corner are the back, home and multitasking buttons. The multitasking button will bring up a transparent overlay to quickly resume recent applications. Swiping the individual tiles left or right will close the applications. A application specific menu does appear when the application has not been updated for Android 4.0’s new button scheme.

The bottom right corner is home to quick notification thumbnails, the time, connectivity logos and a battery bar.

This lower status bar area does not disappear at all, at any time. Although you can enable a lock on it so you won’t accidentally tap the home button when trying to play Angry Birds. When watching videos or pictures it does fade out slightly but true a true full screen ability is not present.

Tapping on this area will display an extended overlay that Asus has modified to include some of their own settings such as Super IPS+ mode, auto brightness and rotate toggles. There are also toggles for Asus’ modified power profiles for the Tegra 3 chipset – power saving, balanced and performance.

On top of this is the usual notification, time and date and battery percentage information.

Application Drawer

An application drawer is exactly that and there is not much more to it than that. Under Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich there are two tabs you can choose from; apps and widgets.

Apps displays all installed applications in alphabetical order. There is no option to view your downloaded applications but it really didn’t bother me personally. Long tapping an application will allow you to add a shortcut to one of your homescreens. Depending on whether you installed the app yourself or not, it will give you the option to uninstall it without having to go deep into the application settings.

The widgets tab will display all of the installed widgets in alphabetical order, a long press of one will allow you to add it to one of your homescreens, given there is enough space. There is also the link to the the Google Play Store in the top right corner.While I would expect many people to leave behind Android 4.0’s stock browser for something like Chrome or Opera, I have based this section on the stock browser to keep things more interesting between reviews.

Most of us just expect something to work, and work without drawing any complaints. The stock browser on the Prime does exactly this. Asus has decided to leave the browser untouched, much like the rest of the software, so it is the stock Ice Cream Sandwich browser. Adversely, HTC often goes to lengths to improve the web experience, without actually achieving anything of notice.

Thanks to the fact we have a 10.1 inch tablet with a 1280 by 800 resolution you able to view and read full webpages with ease. Text reflow is still present for those few occasions you may encounter tiny text.

At all times at the top of the screen will be the tab bar which also grants the option to open a new tab, that by default opens your homepage.

Further to the right along the same bar is three vertical dots menu key, this is new to Android in Ice Cream Sandwich. The old menu button that used to be with the rest of the Android navigational buttons has been retired by Google.

Options accessed from here include refresh, new tab, new incognito tab, share page, find on page, request desktop site, page info and settings.

Also new to Android 4.0 is the ability to save webpages for offline reading, and it is accessed from the menu dropdown. It saves an image of the page and can be retrieved from the bookmark menus. It works well in practice, but since it is an image it does save it in the state you left the webpage. No text reflow or links, just the ability to zoom, scroll and read. It even acts like a ad-blocker of sorts, we found that it removed the ads from the top right of KitGuru’s pages.

Below the tab bar is the URL bar and it is treated by the browser like an additional header to the page. It has the usual back, forward and refresh buttons on the left side of the URL bar.  While on the right is a star, a search magnifying glass and a link to the bookmark menus.

The star is obvious enough, it is there to add bookmarks to either a homescreen or locally on the tablet. Adding bookmarks here to your Google account bookmarks will sync with your Google account and changes are reflected on your PC or laptop.

The search magnifying doesn’t do much more than selecting and clearing the URL bar. Double tapping it will allow you to use voice search.

Into the bookmarks menu now, which is accessed from the right end of the URL bar has three tabs for bookmarks, history and saved pages. Your Chrome bookmarks are integrated into the browser and there is a small collection of local bookmarks as well.

In the history tab you are able to see history based on the date it was viewed or by most visited webpages. You can delete your history straight from here instead of having to take a trip into the more detailed settings menu.

The saved pages tab will display your previously saved pages in a tab format, tapping once will load up the page. A long tap will bring up the option to delete it. It is all pretty simple yet functional; we have Google to thank for that.

Page Loading

Page loading on the Prime was impressive, KitGuru loaded in about 6 seconds and BBC’s desktop site in 4 seconds over my 10 Mb/s Wi-Fi connection. The stock browser’s performance felt overall equal to Chrome for Android.

The main conclusion is that you wont be complaining about the Prime’s page loading performance, or scrolling smoothness for that matter, but that is to be expected when you have a quad core processor under the hood.

Touchscreen Keyboard

I felt it would be inappropriate to not mention the touchscreen keyboards for those people that will forget about the keyboard dock as soon as the retail packaging gets ripped open. By default Asus has included their own keyboard as well as Android 4.0’s default.

Most of the time I used the default Android keyboard, this was mainly because the Asus keyboard is extremely squashed in landscape orientation due to the additional row of numbers.

The Asus keyboard is best for use in portrait orientation however, as it takes up noticeably more space on the screen. While the stock keyboard in the same orientation is better for thumb typing, it really depends on your tablet typing technique.

Overall I would have to give the nod to Android’s default keyboard as it has a better predictive and auto correct system. For picture referencing, the Android keyboard is in grey while the Asus keyboard is mostly white.

As a last piece of information, I gave the word per minute test I mentioned in the keyboard section another go, this time with the default Android keyboard and got a score of 30 WPM, with a much higher ratio of wrongly spelt words compared to the physical keyboards.

Other Applications

Asus has bundled in quite a few of their own and their partners applications, most of which are pretty much useless, at least to me personally. Such bloat includes two magazine applications.

There are some useful ones though, including Polaris Office. It has the ability to create Word, Excel and PowerPoint circa 2003 files. Plus I was able to create the above PowerPoint slide in just a few minutes. I actually used the word processor in combination with Dropbox to write a fair chunk of this review but later reverted to Google Docs as for some reason I often lost a few lines after making modifications soon after saving.

Moving on there is SuperNote, an extensive note taking application that can handle drawings, annotations and all that good stuff. Personally I would still use Evernote or handy dandy Dropbox however.

Then comes Asus’ suite of applications which includes an e-book reader, a DLNA media player, Asus WebStorage, @vibe music streamer and a file manager.

Also included are applications to backup and lock applications. Amazon Kindle and Nvidia’s TegraZone are present to get your tablet experience off to a good start.

The Asus Transformer Prime has a 8 MP rear camera with a F2.4 aperture which is also capable of 1080p video recording at 30 FPS. The front facing camera is a 1.2 MP sensor that is also capable of 480p video. We presume Asus has not included 720p front camera support for the sake of quality and frame rate.

The camera application is simple and very straight-forward. The applications remains much the same as the one found in Android 3.0 Honeycomb and you have the option to take pictures, videos or panoramic images. You can also take time lapse videos and there is a sample of that coming up.

The left of the display is where you will find the viewfinder, while on the right is where all the options can be found. There are the usual scene, white balance, exposure and flash mode settings. The bottom of this section allows you to change capture modes and up top is a preview of the last media captured that links to gallery.

Standard 8 MP images were 3264 by 2448 pixels and anywhere from 1.5 MB to 3 MB depending on the image. Panoramic images were 2254 by 454 and 1.2 MB in size, but it does vary.

1080p videos were recording at 30 FPS, a frame rate that you cannot change, and encoded in MP4 at roughly 16 Mb/s. The 480p clips from the front facing camera were also recorded at 30 frames per second and again encoded in MP4 at roughly 3.7 Mb/s.

Picture quality is very impressive. Colour reproduction is good, while noise is very minimal even at 100% crops, although some detail is lost. That said, shutter lag was quite noticeable, especially compared to the HTC One X that does have a instant shutter feature like the Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

The panoramic images taken on the Prime as easily the best I have ever taken on a device, mainly by just having a lack of clipping and stitching glitches. It would be nice to see some larger images, but the quality for the pixel size can’t be complained about. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-dr8TmmyFg']

The 1080p videos taken by the Prime’s rear camera were pretty good. The high frame rate keeps the plants swaying in the breeze smooth at the start. Looking deeper there were a few issues, colours at the top of the image on the roofs and palm trees are washed out due to the sunlight looking directly into the camera, so I guess that can easily be forgiven.

However, if you have the focus mode set to continuous auto focus you will experience the prolonging clicking of the sensor refocusing and this causes the image to jump at times. It doesn’t help that Asus has placed one of the microphones within a few centimetres of the camera sensor so in relatively quiet environments the clicking is very noticeable. Luckily for Asus, I found that changing the focus mode to infinity does solve the problem with no noticeable effect on video quality. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS-2cXIkyWo']

For some reason time lapse videos are of great interest for me, this one was taken using a 1 second time interval.

Considering the Prime’s camera will mostly be used for pictures and videos that will end up on Facebook, Youtube or printed on a 6×4” print, Asus has included a very strong image sensor.

The Asus Transformer Prime is home to Nvidia’s Tegra 3 SoC that has a 4-PLUS-1 architecture that incorporates five ARM Cortex A9 cores; four high performance cores and one low power core. Keeping this running smoothly is a full gigabyte of RAM.

Asus have also bundled in a small collection of power profiles in order to gain maximum performance, maximum battery or a balance of both. These profiles can all quickly be selected from the quick settings tool and change the chipset’s clock speeds near instantly.

For the battery lovers among us, power saving mode maxes the CPU out at 1 GHz with 1 or 2 cores active, 760 MHz with 3 cores active and 620 MHz with all four active. Balanced mode is the middle of the line profile and restricts the processor’s clock speed to 1.2 GHz. Those wanting every last drip of performance from their Prime will turn on the performance profile which hits a wall at 1.4 GHz for single core operation and 1.3 GHz in every other scenario.

For the hardware performance tests we ran the Prime on all three profiles, while later on for the browser performance tests we only tested with the balanced profile.

The Asus Transformer Prime is by far the most powerful device we have gotten our hands on and the benchmarks reflect this. The quad core Nvidia SoC is untouchable when running one of the two upper performance profiles in Antutu, GL Benchmark, Nenamark2 and Quadrant.

Things get a little closer in Linpack with the dual-core OMAP 4460 in the Motorola Atrix 2 closing the gap between the two, at least in single threaded performance.  I did not include multi-threaded Linpack results as it was impossible to get a precise and reliable result on the Prime.

Going from the balanced to performance power profiles results in roughly 8% higher performance results. The effects of the power saving mode is more obvious, with performance dropping significantly, although it still manages to beat out the Motorola Atrix 2 three times out of five. In fact, the only noticeable downfall of running the power saving profile in real usage was the Tegra 3 optimised Glowball demo slowing down greatly in performance.

The good thing about browser performance tests are their dependence on the browser, operating system and overall CPU performance. They are also left unaffected by resolution of devices.

As I mentioned on the previous page, all browser performance tests have been run using the balanced profile mode.

As you might expect, the Tegra 3 powered Prime leads the pack in three out of four benchmarks. The one that doesn’t result in a Prime win, Peacekeeper, seems to be bumping up against some kind of invisible wall. The Huawei MediaPad, Motorola Atrix 2 and the Prime all have scores close to 330, while all three devices have various chipsets.The Transformer Prime has a 25 Wh lithium-ion polymer battery inside its tablet frame, plus another 22 Wh battery in the keyboard dock. This 47 Wh total battery capacity is getting into serious netbook and some notebook territory, all while powering a device that uses a fraction of the juice.

The tablet itself in combination with the dock is easily good enough to last you a day of heavy use and up to three or so days of moderate usage. Right now I haven’t charged the dock or the tablet for a day or so now (with moderate usage) and the dock still has over 20% of its battery still to give up to the tablet.

So, I’ve told you that the average user’s battery life is going to be amazing, so what about an unusual usage scenario. The above screenshot consists of about 7 hours of screen time with automatic brightness on the standard IPS display mode. Furthermore, the tablet was on the balanced power profile and ran Glowball happily for over 90 minutes and spent the rest of the time switching up between internet browsing, Youtube and idle time on the homescreens.

Aside, idle battery life is unsurpassed due to the Tegra 3’s companion core. Following the aforementioned stress test I went to sleep with the tablet on 14% battery life with auto-sync still on; when I woke up at least 8 hours later it had only dropped 3%.

For those wondering about heat, after the Glowball session it had only mildly warmed up my bed and while the back on the tablet was slightly warm to touch, it was nothing that would be considered uncomfortable.

For some reason I always get tablets over the duration of my school breaks and while the Transformer Prime is not going to satisfy my needs for Battlefield 3 or Skyrim over this time it comfortably found a place in my life. Although I don’t yet see the point of purchasing a tablet for myself as my smartphone can do 98% of the stuff I found myself using the Prime for, with a near-equivalent user experience.

The Asus Transformer Prime is arguably the best looking tablet currently available but the aluminum backing doesn’t add to functionality. It has been widely documented that the Prime falls flat on its face when it comes to GPS functionality. The HTC Incredible S and One X can both pick up and use at least 6 satellites and get accurate locks to 40 feet from a window with a not so clear view to the sky. The Prime fails to view a single satellite at all, an issue so bad that GPS functionality was removed from its specification sheet and Asus are now issuing GPS dongles that remedy the problem.

Asus are aware they messed this up big time in the Prime and the solution (a RF window) will be present on the upcoming aluminum-bodied Transformer Pad Infinity. The recently launched Transformer Pad TF300 doesn't have any issues in the first place because it has a plastic backing.

Getting away from the connectivity issues, the Prime’s body looks and feels good in hand. The 586 gram mass of aluminum and Gorilla Glass doesn’t feel too heavy in hand thanks to the 8.3mm thin profile. The aluminum back is going to be prone to hairline scratches, however.

The Super IPS+ display is frankly amazing, colours are true to their origins and the viewing angles are a ridiculous 178 degrees. The only real let down of the display on the Prime is its relatively limited resolution of 1280 by 800. All flagship tablets from now on should be shipping with Full 1080p displays.

The Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset is arguably king of the hill in the tablet world, its closest competition being Apple’s A5X in the new iPad. The only time I noticed the Prime ever skip a beat was when the power saving performance profile was enabled whilst playing graphic intensive games.

Asus ships the Prime with a lightly modified Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, no silly manufacturer skins here. While sometimes you may associate a lack of bugs with a basic user interface and lack of functionality, this is not the case. The only bugs we ever noticed was the occasional browser crash. There was a noticeable amount of Asus related bloat though. Something that can easily be forgotten about considering Asus appear fully dedicated to providing firmware updates.

The 8 MP rear facing camera on the Prime is simply amazing, we never expected something this good in a tablet. The only drawback is that it doesn’t have the instant shutter feature of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and HTC One series.

Finally, the bundled keyboard dock adds a great deal of value and productivity to the experience and that’s not even considering the added battery life. If you find yourself doing a lot of typing on the go but also want the tablet experience you really don’t have anywhere else to look.

So how much will it set me back?

The Asus Transformer Prime has a RRP of £499.99 for the 32 GB models, this price also includes the keyboard dock.

Other tablets to consider

There are no other Tegra 3 tablets widely available other than the Prime and, to an extent, the recently launched Transformer Pad TF300 . There is no sign of other tablets coming from major players any time soon either; strange. The Transformer Prime really has no direct competition.

If you need true GPS functionality, go with the Pad TF300 as it is £100 cheaper and includes much of the Prime’s features. It arguably offers better value for money but we’ll have to wait to get our hands on it ourselves to be sure.

Meanwhile if you can’t resist the temptation of a Full high definition display on a 10.1 inch screen (again with Asus) the Transformer Pad Infinity is also due to be launching soon. It will also have a higher clocked Tegra 3 chipset and fix the GPS problems found in the Prime.

Software Information

Our unit was running Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich with build number 9.4.2.21

Pros

• 32 GB of storage and the keyboard dock included in the £499.99 RRP.
• Wonderful display in terms of colours and viewing angles.
• Tegra 3 chipset surpasses anything else out there.
• Runs a relatively untampered version Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
• Asus arededicated to providing firmware updates.
• The camera and video quality is impressive to say the least.
• Very few bugs encountered over a two week period.

Cons

• Display only has a 1280×800 resolution.
• GPS functionality is non-existent by nature of design.
• Those wanting a 3G model will have to wait for currently unreleased tablets.
• Aluminum backing scratches relatively easily.

KitGuru says: Tablets, by nature of their form factor are mostly just pieces of plastic, glass and aluminum glued together to me, whereas phones are the beholders of the beauty and design. The Asus Transformer Prime comes under the phone category in regards to this. While it will never make calls or connect to 3G networks in the traditional sense (or GPS for that matter) we really don’t care about that in a tablet. What the Prime combines is some of the finest exterior design, internal specifications and a wonderful keyboard dock into an experience that is currently unrivalled by other tablet manufacturers.

We still can’t wait for the Asus Transformer Pad Infinity and its Full HD display though.

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