Is there any tablet that’s hotter than the Transformer Prime without delay? (Please, don’t say the Kindle Fire .) For weeks we geeks, early adopters and those who love their tech toys were awaiting this, and none too patiently. Make no mistake: this would be probably the most slickest products we test this year and it is not simply because the original Transformer had such a creative design. The Prime is the primary device packing NVIDIA’s hot-off-the-presses Tegra 3 SoC, making it the world’s first quad-core tablet. This comes with promises of longer-than-ever runtime and blazing performance (five times faster than Tegra 2, to be exact), all wrapped in a package measuring just 8.3mm (0.33 inches) thick — even skinnier than the iPad 2 or Galaxy Tab 10.1. Throw in specs like a really perfect IPS+ Gorilla Glass display, eight megapixel rear camera and a confirmed ICS update inside the pipe or even we seen-it-all Engadget editors were drooling.
All of which suggests we dropped just everything when a 32GB Prime showed up on our doorstep earlier this week, and shortly enough, you will need your chance to nab one too. ASUS announced today that the WiFi-only models may be available through online sellers the week of December 19th, and in retail the week after. (No word yet on 3G versions for the U.S. just yet.) It’ll start at $499 for the 32GB model — not bad considering bucks is the going rate for a high-end tablet with 16GB of storage. From there you may get a 64GB number for $599, while that signature keyboard dock will set you back yet another $149. Worth it? Read directly to discover.
Hardware
The Prime looks familiar and no, it is not simply because we’re observing a tool that’s dominated by a ten-inch slab of glass. If you have been following the hot explosion of Ultrabooks as obsessively as you could have Ice Cream Sandwich, you then know the second one-gen Transformer shares its industrial design with ASUS’ line of 1 Zenbooks 1 , which went on sale back in October. Like those skinny laptops, the Prime incorporates a spun metal aluminum lid, this time available in “amethyst gray” and “champagne gold.” Sure, there’ll be some who think these brushed metal digs would look more appropriate on a classy kitchen appliance, but a lot of you’ll appreciate how distinctive this tablet looks — and the way nicely that faint circular pattern masks fingerprints and scuffs. In case it wasn’t obvious once we reviewed the 2 UX31 2 , you could count us one of several second group. We predict it looks great.
If, however, you observed the Zenbooks are a bit too fashion-forward, the entire spun metal thing manages to seem less aggressively industrial on this tablet form. Maybe it is because the Prime is available in a hotter, more inviting gold. Maybe it’s just that the Zenbooks have a severe, pancake-flat shape that makes them look painfully futuristic. Whatever it’s, the Prime is barely as lovely, though something tells us it will be somewhat less polarizing.
The Prime is each bit to boot-made as you’d want your $500 tablet to be.
Moving past aesthetics, there is not any denying the Prime is each piece besides-made as you’d want your $500 tablet to be, and we just can’t recover from how thin and light-weight it’s. Oftentimes, we make excuses for metal tablets, similar to the 7-inch 3 T-Mobile Springboard 3 and 4 HTC Flyer 4 (hell, let’s throw the 1st-gen iPad in there, too). We’re used to saying, “Well, yeah, it’s a bit dense, but a minimum of it’s well built.” When it comes to the Prime, though, its 0.33-inch-thick frame makes it a smidge skinnier than the 5 Galaxy Tab 10.1 5 and, at 586 grams, it is a wee bit lighter, too. Despite that it manages to feel considerably more premium. That’s not less than partly attributable to that metal construction, which we won’t help preferring to the texture of plastic — as a minimum, this is, when it truly is both thinner and lighter than something made up of the stuff. That is not to assert the ten.1 feels flimsy, just that this feels better.
It have to be said, though, that it doesn’t necessarily feel better within the hand. While the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has gentle, rounded edges that respect your meaty mitts, the Transformer Prime is instead a tapered curve with a somewhat sharp edge. It is the same kind of shape because the iPad 2 and, while it certainly isn’t uncomfortable to hang, the terminating edges of this device can cut into the more vulnerable bits of your palms after an extended period of use. This does, at the least, help the tablet become a pleasant clamshell shape when paired with its dock, the accessory that turns this thing from being a merely really nice tablet right into a potential laptop replacement.
So far as ports and other such trappings go, the optional dock naturally steals the show with its full-sized USB 2.0 socket and SD card reader. The choice at the tablet itself is a little bit light — but not more or not up to most slates. Pick this guy up in landscape mode and you will find a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera watching you, with an eight megapixel, f/2.4 shooter ’round back, coupled with an LED flash.
On that high edge you can find a lone power / lock button with a wee tiny LED indicator built-in, tucked over in the left corner. Look down on the opposite side and you’ll see the proprietary connector that allows the tablet to slide neatly into the dock. This handles all the data exchange with the dock itself and, if you want to get data off the thing, this is how you’ll have to do it. There’s no standard micro-USB connector here.
There are two other openings on the bottom that serve as receivers for a pair of latches inbuiltto the dock. These come plugged up with bits of rubber when you unbox the tablet, so be sure to clear them before your slate has its first curious encounter with the dock. Still holding it in landscape, you’ve got a 3.5mm headphone jack on the right side, which cuts a rather drastic profile thanks to the heavily tapered edges, while the left edge houses a volume rocker, mini-HDMI socket and — happy day — an unoccupied and uncovered microSD slot.
The single tweeter exactly where your palm is likely to go should you be holding it with your right hand.
Rounding things out is a single finely cut speaker grill, sitting on the right side under the back. This of course dismisses any hopes of stereo sound but, more troublingly, places that single tweeter exactly where your palm is likely to go should you be holding it with your right hand. Of course, you can always just flip the tablet over should the dialogue from that episode of SVU you’re streaming get a little more muffled than usual, but we’d have preferred the speaker somewhere on the top. Or, even better, facing right at you, as on the new 6 10.1N 6 . We are happy to report that, when unimpeded, the volume coming out of the lone speaker is actually quite good.
Display
With or without the heroic prefix and mathematical designator it’s safe to say this is a very nice panel.
ASUS, apparently jealous of the increasingly lengthy string of designations Samsung is applying to its OLED displays, has crafted what it calls a Super IPS+ LCD for the Transformer Prime. With or without the heroic prefix and mathematical designator it’s safe to say this is a very nice panel. What you have here is a 10-inch, 1280 x 800 display that manages a stunning brightness maxing out at 600 nits, handily topping what you’ll find on most laptop panels and more than 50 percent higher than your average tablet panel. The luminosity is quite noticeable, and the contrast too, with deep darks and vibrant brights. However, color reproduction seemed a bit flat, with whites tending toward yellow and brighter hues coming up short.
If you’re using this tablet indoors you won’t need to go anywhere near maximum brightness to get an eyeful, though we won’t blame you if you crank it up anyway. Should you want to dial things down, though, ASUS allows you to disable that 600-nit, Super IPS+ mode to extend the battery life. Even when we did that and dialed the brightness down to 50 percent, the display was still quite arresting.
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2 The viewing angles are also exceptionally wide, which will come in handy if you and a friend decide to prop the tablet up within the dock and watch a movie together. ASUS claims 178-degree visibility and indeed, we were able to make out the screen clearly from severe side angles. From the front, too, the colors stayed strong even as we dipped the screen farther and farther forward — an area where even high-end displays on MacBooks start to show their limitations. That yellowish hue did start to darken when we took the angles to extremes, but even then we could still follow what was happening onscreen without issue.
The dock
3 Despite the fact that ASUS calls this the Transformer, out of the box it isn’t even a Gobot.
Despite the fact that ASUS calls this the Transformer, out of the box it isn’t even a Gobot. To make the thing live up to its name you’ll need to spring for the $150 signature accessory: the keyboard dock. Let’s start by being clear on one thing: this is not the old dock, rebadged to go with this brand new tablet. It, too, has gone on a diet and, thanks to some slimmer dimensions, it won’t be compatible with your first-gen Transformer. (Sorry, early adopters.) The good news is that even with the dock attached, the tablet is thinner and lighter than a netbook (remember those?) and, shockingly, better-built than most were. You can easily stuff the whole thing in your messenger bag with plenty of room left for, well, anything, really.
To connect the tablet to the accessory you simply flip-up the connecting port at the back of the dock and slip in the Transformer. While the thing sadly does not make the iconic Transfoming sound (which 3 sounds like this 3 , of course), it does at least latch securely thanks to those two metal hooks that grab on and won’t let go as soon as it’s slotted into place. Won’t let go, that is, until you slip a release to the left, at which point you can easily lift the thing free.
As soon as the Transformer falls into place something magical starts happening: the battery gets recharged. There is a second battery inside the dock and it nobly sacrifices its own juice so that the tablet can live on. So, plug a nearly dead tablet into a full dock and, after some time, you’ll have a full tablet and a dead dock. That means, if nothing else, this is a very handy $150 external battery.
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8 But of course it’s also a heck of a lot more than that. With this you’ll get a full USB 2.0 port and a SD card reader, giving you yet another way to expand the storage. You can use that USB port to plug in an external mouse if you like, but the idea is of course to instead use the little trackpad that’s built into what is ostensibly a wrist-rest at the bottom of the keyboard but, thanks to the petite dimensions here, doesn’t offer much respite at all.
That trackpad may be small but it is at least reasonably responsive, letting you use gestures for scrolling webpages and even for navigating around the tablet’s myriad home screens. (Though if you want to pinch-zoom you’ll have to reach up on the display.) In fact if anything it’s too responsive, picking up the most subtle of brushes from your fingers as you type, often causing the cursor on your tablet to jump unexpectedly and unwantedly. There’s no way to disable the trackpad automatically while you’re typing, which is a major annoyance.
Also annoying are the trackpad buttons, built into the bottom. Push in on the left for a primary click and on the right for secondary, but try and click anywhere toward the middle and it just won’t move a bit. The button itself seems plenty wide, but only the outer extents can actually be clicked. Thankfully you can simply tap anywhere and just ignore the buttons altogether.
The keyboard itself is passable, but far from good. The island keys are tiny and have a very light touch to them, but we just wish for a bit more room. Everything is cramped but, it must be said, most of the important keys are reasonably generously sized — except, unfortunately, for the right shift.
One final annoyance: when mounted in the dock, the whole contraption is disconcertingly top-heavy, the Transformer itself weighing considerably more than the lid of your average laptop. This made the thing very prone to tipping over backward. In fact we inadvertently sent ours tumbling off of its perch and into the floor while writing this very section of the review. Some deft reflexes, honed on years of Samurai Showdown and its ilk, saved our tablet from crashing into the floor, but suffice to say you should always use yours in a secure location.
But the question, of course, is whether you should use this dock at all, and we honestly think that we might. While typing on a keyboard this small is certainly a chore, it sure as heck beats using an on-screen keyboard. And, while we aren’t entirely fond of the trackpad, it certainly makes selecting blocks of text much easier than tapping and dragging and tapping again with your fingers on the screen. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the experience is far better here than on Motorola’s various 0 lapdocks 0 .
Performance and graphics
|
Benchmark |
ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime |
| Quadrant | 3,023 |
| Linpack | 43.35 (single-thread) / 67.05 (multi-thread) |
| Nenamark 1 | 60.07 |
| Nenamark 2 | 46.07 |
| Vellamo | 953 |
| SunSpider 0.9.1 | 1,861 |
The Prime is something of a curiosity around these parts in that it’s the first tablet to ship with NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 SoC. Actually, let’s just call it what it is: the first quad-core tablet, period. We’ve run our usual spate of benchmarks (listed above for your viewing pleasure), and the combined scores are among the highest we’ve yet seen, handily beating the Galaxy Tab 8.9 and 7.0 Plus we recently tested in most cases.
Suffice to say, all the mundane bits — swiping through menus, opening apps — run as briskly as you’d expect on a quad-core slate. The Prime’s display is as responsive as it is gorgeous, and we made ourselves at home quickly — so much so that we found ourselves tapping the screen even when we were plugged into the dock. Make no mistake: the Prime is fast, but we suspect Honeycomb’s 3D animations aren’t the best way to highlight this, given that dual-core Tegra 2 can stomach these flourishes well enough already.
That said, we were sorry to still see some occasional stutters and hiccups from time to time, instances where the device would hesitate for just a half-second or so before responding. It’s the kind of thing we’ve seen on just about every Android device to date and it’s a bit of a shame that even four whopping cores running at 1.3GHz can’t do away with them.
Battery life
|
Tablet |
Battery Life |
| ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime | 10:17 |
| Apple iPad 2 | 10:26 |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 | 9:55 |
| Apple iPad | 9:33 |
| HP TouchPad | 8:33 |
| Lenovo IdeaPad K1 | 8:20 |
| Motorola Xoom | 8:20 |
| T-Mobile G-Slate | 8:18 |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus | 8:09 |
| Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet | 8:00 |
| Archos 101 | 7:20 |
| Archos 80 G9 | 7:06 |
| RIM BlackBerry PlayBook | 7:01 |
| Acer Iconia Tab A500 | 6:55 |
| T-Mobile Springboard (Huawei MediaPad) | 6:34 |
| Toshiba Thrive | 6:25 |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab | 6:09 |
| Velocity Micro Cruz T408 | 5:10 |
| Acer Iconia Tab A100 | 4:54 |
Pity the Engadget editor who had to babysit this thing while it ran unplugged, looping through our battery drain test for hours and hours.
Yes, wow. Pity the Engadget editor who had to babysit this thing while it ran unplugged, looping through our battery drain test for hours and hours. ASUS says the Prime’s 22Wh pack should last a maximum of 12 hours without the dock and indeed, it squeezed out an impressive 10 hours and 17 minutes in our battery rundown test, which involves looping a video with the brightness fixed at 50 percent and WiFi on but not connected. That’s a scant nine minutes short of what the 1 iPad 2 1 accomplished in the same test, a difference that could just as well swing the other way should we test these two a second time. This was also running in standard power mode — upshifting to economy mode likely would have delivered an even more longevous result.
Much of this is thanks to the new Tegra 3 chipset, which is not only fiendishly quick but also freakishly efficient. The chipset is capable of processing each frame that’s rendered to the screen and determining the minimum necessary brightness of the backlight to properly display it. The backlight is constantly cycling up and down while the color temperature is dynamically cycled to compensate. The net result: great visuals and killer battery life.
ASUS promises a further six hours of dependability when docked with the keyboard and we’ll update this review as soon as we have a result — suffice to say it’s still running. This will be, after all, a whopping 16 hour test if things go according to plan.
We should also tell you that the Prime can charge via the bundled AC adapter or over USB. But — and there is a but — the dock doesn’t yet support USB charging, so if you want to prime yourself for a potential 18 hours of runtime, you had best start out near an outlet.
Software
9 We wish we could use this as an occasion to walk you through ICS on a tablet but alas, that day isn’t upon us just yet. The Prime ships with Android 3.2.1, and you know what that means: Honeycomb, jazzed up ever-so slightly with a few removable widgets, power management profiles and handy settings shortcuts, which you can access by swiping or tapping the clock in the lower-right corner. Those settings, by the by, include Bluetooth, WiFi, IPS / Super IPS+ mode and auto-rotation for the screen. It’s quite similar to what Samsung is packing in its TouchWiz’d Galaxy Tabs these days.
Those widgets, meanwhile, are pretty harmless and not particularly exciting, with weather and mail, as well as a larger one that cobbles together weather, calendar, music, Gallery access and a shortcut to the last website you visited. Again, these are easy to dump if you like your homepages a little more pristine, as we typically do.
0 As for pre-installed apps, the Prime comes with @vibe Music, Amazon Kindle, App Backup, App Locker, Big Top THD, Bladeslinger, Google Books, Davinci THD, File Manager, Glowball, Movie Studio, MyCloud, MyLibrary, MyNet, Netflix, Photaf Lite, Polaris Office, Press Reader, Riptide GPk ShadowGun, SuperNote, WebStorage, yskk, Zen Pinball THD and Zinio. Yes, that’s a lot of games, and you can want to be using them — if only to show off just how good this thing is at 3D gaming.
And it is good. Very good. ShadowGun is the showcase title here and it runs beautifully. NVIDIA has been promising 2 “PC-class” graphics 2 and, while we wouldn’t quite take it that far — the game lacks some of the visual polish of top-shelf PC shooters — it is safe to say these are the best graphics we’ve yet seen on a tablet. The water effects in particular are very good, and more importantly it’s a fun little shooter.
Camera
1 We’re usually quick to dismiss the cameras on tablets because, really, other than the odd video chat just because you can we don’t ever find ourselves flipping on either front or rear sensor. But, we dutifully did here to test out the Transformer Prime’s picture-taking abilities and, it must be said, it does an admirable job with its eight megapixel rear shooter. Its auto-focus sometimes took a bit too long to make up its mind and the resulting pictures occasionally seemed under-saturated, but the camera took more than acceptable looking images even in less than optimal conditions. So, in case you really wish to lug around a 10-inch camera, you could do a lot worse.
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6 Wrap-up
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The Galaxy Tab 10.1 has had a long run as the top-tier Android tablet in the 10-inch size, but that position has now properly been usurped. The original Transformer was a very good tablet and it successor steps up another notch. The Transformer Prime is thinner and lighter than the rest and, with 32GB of storage available for a dollar under $500, it’s a better deal than most of the top-tier contenders.
The dock, however, is a bit of a tougher sell. If you need crazy battery life on the road then it’s definitely a good choice, even if you won’t be relying on that cramped keyboard too often. In fact, the less you need to use that part the better, but it’s still a perfectly usable way to enter URLs and it sure beats the pants off of any virtual, touchscreen text input method .
For the moment the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime is the best Android tablet at the market. All hail the hot king.
[Review co-written by Dana Wollman and Tim Stevens]
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