Gadgetory

what's up everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here we've had the asus eee pad transformer prime in our offices for just about a day well not enough time to run it through a for review and put it through the gamut of tests that we'd like we have had just the right amount of time to put together some first impressions what it's like to have quad-core how that translates to operating system improvements what it's like to the end-user how video looks how text looks and all that kind of things that come together to make a whole tablet package so as you evaluate whether or not you're going to jump up to a Tegra 3 quad-core tablet hopefully this video will help you decide let's go ahead and take a first look at the asus eee pad transformer prime alright so first let me run through specs of this guy and it's highlighted by what's under the hood Nvidia's Tegra 3 processor which is actually quad-core and it does have a fifth companion court in there that does a lot of the background processing at a lower clock speed so you get improved battery life so from a pricing standpoint we're looking at 499 for 32 gig or 599 for 64 gig no word yet on us 3g pricing or if a 3g model will be available it is running as you can see here android 3.2 honeycomb asus head says that ice cream sandwich will be coming on it so from a dimension standpoint it's 263 by 180 point 8 by a very thin 8.3 millimeters you can see just how thin that device is right there and how responsive the accelerometers as I try and show you the thinness and all this is going to weigh 568 grams you're looking at a 10.1 inch super IPS plus display it's LED backlit with a resolution of 1280 by 800 and it's got guerrilla glass 12 hours battery of course that Tegra 3 chip we talked about gig of ram on again in a 32 or 64 gigabyte capacities we're going to talk a lot about the camera but it's got an 8 megapixel shooter on the back but that's not the only camera that lives here it's got a 1.2 megapixel shooter up front I like singing shooter for camera makes me feel fancy alright so let's go ahead and talk about the tablet let's go ahead and start with build quality when i first reviewed the asus eee pad transformer the his father cousin of this guy talked about how it was one of the best android tablets that are used but to build quality a little bit plasticky not so with the asus eee pad transformer prime the build quality here is outstanding while the back is still plastic it does have that brushed metal look and feel to it and it's an extremely thin tablet as you're using this you're really not cognizant of any of the seams the borders here that go from screen to back are very smooth I haven't seen any gaps in there something not gonna get dust that's going to get trapped underneath here which is always nice their problem that I've had with tablets build quality here at least initially appears to be absolutely outstanding the designers at Asus clearly spent a long time making sure that every design aspect of this tablet was accounted for right down to the almost hidden speaker grills or that lived there on the left-hand side it's got a bit of that taper look to it and it's it's very nicely on the desk without having any of that tapered sort of wobble that some tablets can have especially the vice like the iPad one had a little bit of that wall bull air this guy sits very very very nicely alright so first question I have my took this guy of the box with speed it's got a Tegra 3 chip in it how fat is it going to be we're still running a full test of benchmark so stay tuned attacking a buffalo to see what those scores are but that is the speed translate to everyday use very well this is hands down the fastest tablet not just respect standpoint but from a usage standpoint that I have ever used so this device has been a completely restarted nothing has been opened in the background it's extremely fast to scroll through here opening applications are an absolute breeze I haven't had any issue multitasking things just opening very very very quickly and as I go through and sort of show you the speed of the tablet it's one of those things that you have to actually use yourself you can take my word for it that it's fast but this thing is absolutely blistering so let's go and take a look at the browser will show you a little bit of the speed here in the processor so we'll go ahead it's going to load up asus com or connected just to Wi-Fi and even just from a pinch to zoom standpoint it's very fast and one of the cool things asus is done we'll talk a little bit about some two aces tweaks here you can see as I'm scrolling there's this little bit of a bar here and it lets you scroll a little bit easier if you don't feel like flicking so this experience at least thus far from for the first day has been very very fast apps load extremely quickly whether or not I'm loading you know really pretty intensive game or whether or not I'm learning book so the browser things just work very quickly as you'd expect from a device that's this powerful there's the issue a little bit of the software not being fully optimized for quad core things are optimized for quad core absolutely hull and things that are optimized only for dual core also absolutely hall which is great for the end user experience which is ultimately of utmost importance all right so it's a tablet it's mostly a big screen with a lot of big specs so how does this screen look well let me go ahead and show you let's go ahead and jump on into the gallery the resolution here is 1280 x 800 again so let's go ahead and start with photos and show you what photos look like and obviously a little bit as lost in translation from the tablet to being recorded to upload YouTube to whatever connection or data speed you have why are watching this and what resolution but images here are absolutely beautiful the screen on the original epad tranformed was great the screen here sort of keeps up with that really beautiful i took this thing outside and direct sunlight and i had no problem with direct sunlight visibility and i'll show you why when we get to some of the easiest weeks in here but the screen is absolutely beautiful you also have an incredible amount of viewing angle here as you look at this i really don't have any sort of wash out that you get from some other tablets really regardless the angle that you're looking at regardless of the lights that i have here i'm using while I'm filming the screen is just absolutely vibrant and extremely beautiful here as you go through and take a look at some the images but let me just aren't the only thing you're going to want to do on your tablet what about videos let me go and show you what some videos look like here folks today's just preloaded a few on here and while i was viewing youtube videos or videos that i took myself things work very nicely let's go ahead and look at videos and we'll open up a nvidia tegra 3 video and it's going to go ahead and talk about Tegra 3 and you can see just how nicely things look here if you want to rent a movie from the android market or put a movie on that you you know bought yourself it is an incredible video experience it really looks nicely it looks nice 1280 by 800 is not the highest resolution screen out there but it does look you know very nice to the end user experience notice the any sort of pixilation at all especially when you're dealing with fast motion like if you're watching you know sporting events or sports highlights or things that have a lot of quick movement to it the refresh rate seems to be extremely high so let's go and talk a little bit about texts go ahead and look at google books when the apps i opened earlier let's go ahead and read Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland you can see what text is going to look like on here and of course you can adjust the backlight to sort of suit your needs and it's that google book experience that we've seen and things look you know pretty nice you don't have any sort of pixilation here at all as you're going through and looking at text in books you've got a little bit of ice cream sandwich esque things here the menu buttons at the bottom sort of disappear those three dots you have to know where they are you go ahead and hit home you can jump back let me show you the text on some website where you can zoom all the way in let's go ahead and launch technobuffalo and this is probably a pretty good time to also talk about the keyboard that asus has chosen to include this is not my favorite keyboard whether on android or whether it's on an ipad or any other tablet operating system or any other mobile operating system it's a little bit awkwardly designed i do occasionally like having that phone number row but i didn't find a keyboard to be overly responsive but when the nice things about android is that you can tweak the keyboard and you can customize a keyboard to find one that suits your needs the best so let's go ahead and kick up technobuffalo here there we go and we'll go ahead and take a look at an article and we'll see what some texts look like so we've got to pick something interesting breaking news gamepro magazine is no more too sad i used to read that magazine all the time as a kid so go ahead and scroll down a little bit to hear some text and we'll do a little bit of zooming in and as we zoom all the way in these Farnes going to let us go we're not having any pixilation at all the text is very crisp and the text is very very very clear so don't have to worry about that much at all and as I'm going through using this tablet you notice that my fingers are on here as well and I got pretty clean hands I just watched on my washroom several times a day so they're not the dirtiest I don't have greasy pizza fingers but the screen was just clean before I started filming and it is already just littered with fingerprints now it's going to be true with a lot of tablets this one seems to just suck in fingerprints I wondered why they include the cleaning cloths with it now I know why you're going to want to keep a shirt handy or some sort of cleaning cloth with you as you're using this tablet something to keep in mind all right so let's talk about games this is one of the things that I was most looking forward to with the transformer prime there's one of the things that ACS was really touting during some of the press demos was how this thing is going to handle games and this is one of the examples where you can see software that's optimized for quad core so let's go ahead and take a look at one of the games that takes the most advantage of it and of course we'll go ahead and take a look at rip tide I say of course like you knew i was going to select Riptide there are a lot of choices here I can download a ton of optimized games from the TegraZone when this is going to be released so go ahead and touch the start and you can see some of the will go ahead and click erase and jump right in here alpha city tiger shark so this is a fun game for forget seeing you can serve as see the detail in the water here it's going to tell me to race you control with the accelerometer but you can see sort of the amount of background detail that's here in the prosthetic be done I'm going to crash into the wall but it's really an impressive experience probably the most impressive game though that we played is shadowgun and this is a game that we actually hooked up via the hdmi port out on the side to an HD television in the office and with playing on a big screen TV while using a wireless controller and we'll talk about that in the full review in a gaming overview that we're going to do but it is something that this is capable of doing especially with the bigger horsepower so let me show you what this looks like it's very Gears of War esque so it's going to go ahead and load on the graphics here just really impressive oh it's most exciting about this is what developers are going to be able to do as they get hold of the hardware make it to take advantage of everything that quad core is going to be capable of of course the Tegra 3 is going to be capable of you know the future is supposed to be very bright and I expect it to be very bright you know we're probably looking at a paradigm-shifting tablet here as we sort of change from battery drain dual-core to really battery sipping quad core so you can go ahead and see what things look like and see the graphics here you know it is I'd say last generation console quality so you know oh it looks very close to you know ps2 original xbox here things are just really beautiful and this is an early game you know as developers get better chance you're really going to see an improved experience again go ahead and output this via HDMI out which lives right there to an age television you can gain get it right on the tablet or you can pick up you know a variety of wireless controllers to get your game on of course this one is sort of ps3 esque or playstation ask let's go ahead and exit out of this game kind of despite how much i want to play it go ahead and rotate this back into landscape and let's continue our first impressions alright so this is running honeycomb but there are a lot of nvidia little tweaks in here and some of the best tweaks actually these widgets widgets in honeycomb some people love them some people don't I really like what asus has done with them they don't take up a lot of space you can still see the background it's sort of hover there as you can see my location the amount of emails I've got this is really handy for battery there's a ton of others as well so let's go ahead and show you what they are so you can see aces email the Aces time and you've got sort of your stock honeycomb ones and gets now stock ice cream sandwich they've got on the Galaxy Nexus they're all very similar but the east is tweaks here are really nice but they extend far past widgets I'm gonna go ahead and show you some of them here so jump into settings take a look at Asus customized settings and here's screw or things kind of get interesting so I mentioned earlier that's got great outdoor visibility super IPS outdoor mode so the screen brightness is set to a high level consumes more battery power so you can sort of determine whether or not your indoor or outdoor i'll just adjust the brightness for you here screenshot so you can capture screenshots by holding the recent apps key which is kind of a nice thing you can choose what file format you want whether or not it's going to be jpg or PNG for a little bit of improved quality here this is a probably one of the most interesting tweaks assistant performance so normal mode is going to give you the most optimal performance it's going to use those quad core whenever possible and I use that companion core the least balance modal obviously find a balance between the two of them there and power saving mode is what quite obviously go into power-save for you and ill use that companion core the low voltage or low processor low clock speed companion court as often as I can it's nice sort of have these options dot having to go through and tweak or do any hacking to control things here a notification panel asus quick settings and touchpad pointer style so mouse cursor mode if you want it'll sort of give you a cursor as you use it and then you've got some settings for the optional keyboard dock which we'll talk about in the full review and you can see the unboxing of over on technobuffalo alright so let me go ahead and show you some other cool things here and I'll run through the stuff very quickly the cameras got the 8 megapixel camera takes pretty decent pictures least it appears to but what's really cool is the video side of things I scroll into video we take a look at some of the settings this is one of the areas where you'll start seeing the advantages of quad core so I'll go ahead and take a look at something options here particularly that one right down below and get the glare out of the way you've got time-lapse interval so actually this can take and process time-lapse video for this you can speed things up really quickly and it works very nicely and I'll do full demonstrations again in the full review so in conclusion first impressions this is honeycomb better than you've ever seen it if you've experienced honeycomb on another tablet and you've had a nice experience or maybe it less than nice experience you have an experience honeycomb until you've seen it on the transformer prime which makes them even more excited about ice cream sandwich on this I was a bit skeptical and dubious that this was going to launch without ice cream sandwich the software wasn't always necessarily written for quad core but this is extremely fast from the end user experience this is a tablet I could very easily use every day but again this is just my impressions after 24 hours this may change as we run it through benchmarks and tests and sort of see what else it's capable of doing but it appears to be a very quick very capable tablet which really deserves a top spot on your tablet wish lists so guys do any questions or things you want to see us covered in upcoming videos or to mention in our full review leave your comments down below and for all your coverage of the asus eee pad transformer prime be sure to check us out on technobuffalo for all your tech news as well I am jon rettinger and I will see you in the next video bye bye you