Gadgetory

what's up everyone jon rettinger from technobuffalo here with a full review of one of the most hyped tablets of the year it is the asus eee pad transformer prime it is the first Tegra 3 quad-core tablet on the market let's go ahead and dig in and see if there's more than meets the eye of this thin little package so we've had this guy kicking around the TechnoBuffalo office for just about a week and during that time I've had a lot of opportunity to run it through a full gamut of paces including seeing Asus push out a firmware update which really increased and improved overall performance and we'll talk about it so this review is going to talk about screen speed battery camera design browsing some of the Asus add-ons we'll talk a little bit about the keyboard dock and then I'll give you a conclusion so whether or not this is going to be a good buy for you but before we do that let me go ahead and remind you what the specs of this tablet are because there is a lot of this diminutive package first what's it going to cost you four hundred ninety nine dollars for a 32 gigabyte model or five hundred ninety-nine dollars for a 64 gigabyte model and it's going to be available in mid-december so just a few more weeks to wait it is running Android 3.2 and will be upgraded to ice cream sandwich in the very early part of 2012 asus haven't given us a full hour an exact date except to say that it will be coming very soon we have seen though a proof of concept showing Ice Cream Sandwich running relatively smoothly on a transformer prime so expect that to come again very soon so from a dimension standpoint 263 by 180 point eight by eight point three millimeters this makes that eight extremely thin tablet and thinner than we probably call its biggest competitor the ipad 2 and it weighs 568 grams it's a tablet it's mostly a display this is a pretty impressive display it's 10.1 inches of course that's measured diagonally LED backlit with the resolution of 1280 by 800 with something asos is calling super IPS plus we'll talk a lot about the screen they'll during the review and it's all augmented with Gorilla Glass battery asus claims you're going to get about 12 hours of course got the Tegra 3 quad-core chip in it it's got 1 gig of ram 32 or 64 gigabyte configurations on the back of it 8 megapixel camera right there that can shoot full 1080p video on the front it's got a one-point 2 megapixel shooter living right there in the middle no word yet on 3g availability a specular model is just going to be Wi-Fi only and that's 802 11 BG and n alright so we ran through all the specs I'm gonna take a deep breath let's go ahead and first talk about the screen that's when the first thing that I noticed when I started using the transformer prime the super IPS plus panel is absolutely beautiful and that I PS power plus name is just something that Asus kind of came up with but whether they made up the name or not it translates to an absolutely gorgeous display with incredible viewing angles actually so you can see the home screen right here nobody's going to catch on video and as I go ahead and move it see it rotate that viewing angles still are really impressive whether you're viewing it from the side almost at a full angle you can still very clearly see the screen you don't get any sort of wash out now if I pull up a website and do that where there is actually content there you still get that same effect even while you're viewing text or not viewing text the viewing angle here I was absolutely tremendous as it rotates all around the screen you're also going to have pretty good outdoor visibility as well there are some custom a su settings that improve that all that's going to do is increase or decrease the brightness and we'll talk about this ace to settings doesn't move along but if you do a lot of your tablet viewing or movie watching or typing or internet browsing outside I are going to be able to get pretty decent viewing on this so including those that like to read books as well images and video also look really nice on here so let me go ahead and show you some I'll go ahead and jump into the gallery let's go ahead and take a look at some of the photos that asus has so graciously loaded on here I love the beach let's take a look at some beach images and obviously there's a little bit lost in the translation coming from the tablet to the camera to YouTube depending on what quality or watching this in but the screen here does look absolutely beautiful pinch-to-zoom is obviously very quick as you scroll through and see different images you can hopefully see how bright and vibrant this is there isn't any sort of pixilation even as you zoom in that's probably representative of the image here but also the quality of the display so still images look absolutely great but what about video if you want to watch decent amount of video on here as I'm inclined to think that you do video look great on here so let me show you some of the default ones that nvidia has loaded on here let's show this one go ahead and have it video on here is absolutely tremendous as well again you could probably surmise that from how nice the still let me just looked the moving images also look very very nice so this is always a good video to watch looks like a trailer for something probably worthwhile so go ahead and eggs at us still images and video absolutely tremendous one of the strongest points of the asus eee pad transformer prime so no need to worry about watching video or how it is going to look what about text though there's probably spend a lot of your time looking at websites in viewing text i'm going to say what that looks like it's go ahead and open up google books it's going to open up the last book i was reading with Alice in Wonderland but it's not so I'll going to open that up this is sort of the free books that come with google books then you can start to see one of these small problems and glitches that I've had Oh at the transformer prime there we go oftentimes taps aren't always a registered it happened relatively infrequently probably one out of every 40 tabs I had actually tapped again but of course you saw that right here on camera text looks absolutely gorgeous on the screen Ian as you'd expect and you can increase or decrease brightness depending on what's going to be best for your particular set of eyes but no problem reading a book here of course pages will turn quickly that's all pretty standard tablet stuff as you would expect I'm not going to go through any more pages because I don't want to ruin the story for you so go ahead and go back there alright so Tegra 3 quad-core how fast is this guy some explain a little bit about how Tegra 3 works versus how Tiger q works the initial thing is to think it's got four cores it's going to be twice as fast as dual core on something interesting that asus is done they've actually added a fifth companion core to this quad core up so that fifth companion core is going to do it runs at a low power low power consumption and a low processor speed around the 500 megahertz setting and it's going to do a lot of the background stuff that ordinarily all cores would have to be doing so if you've got it turned off or on standby in your bag and it's pulling an email companion course going to do that keeping video playing you don't need all four cores for that companion core is going to do it so a lot of the intensive or the non intensive stuff is going to be done the back by that companion core which is going to mean that only are you going to get really improved performance about forty percent better performance you're also going to get better battery life at your game something we're going to talk about but i do want to give a bit of perspective on how this quad core works and it's extremely fast things here work absolutely tremendously whether you are opening apps or opening games or playing games the speed and performance here are absolutely tremendous and i think it's really nicely illustrated by the shadow gun game which looks absolutely gorgeous and almost like a ps2 original xbox type quality you've got a sort of a Gears of War type game here shadowgun it looks absolutely great you can use wireless controls with this so you can use a su sent us a logitech wireless gamepad that we were using the game on our HDTV it's got hdmi out on the side and go ahead and plug that into your television but gaming looks absolutely beautiful you can see right here this is sort of hard to parallel from the tablet world so you can say looks like controls are kind of standard it's a third-person shooter but it just looks again absolutely gorgeous and the performance here is great you can see some of the tensions of detail when you look at the background graphics and if you see some water things here just look absolutely great and I've said great many times that's really what I feel about the processor here things are just very quick and everything opens up about as fast as you can expect so camera you know things are opening up you know pretty fast go ahead and jump on it the camera will talk again a bit more about that as we go if you are all about the benchmarks oh did run an article benchmarking this guy used a variety different benchmarking tools including quadrant quadrants on 22 CF bench and Nana mark 2 again link will be down below if you want to check out the scores were moral being very very very fast this is the honeycomb experience that android fans were expecting this is a tablet experience that tablet users deserve this is the this is honeycomb done right it's the fastest honeycomb experience that I've seen and that includes the previous champ which was the Samsung Galaxy Tab line highlighted by the 10.1 this thing is faster it feels smoother and it feels more elegant makes me very excited to think about what it's going to look like when it gets ice cream sandwich and we start getting code and apps that are optimized for quad core I think we're only going to get an improved experience again just really fast so let me go ahead and show you what some of these the kernel that we're running here what the operational version is i'm sure that asus is going to be updating this as we get closer to release as we already saw an update see when those problems with the screen as we get closer to an update so you can see what versions were running here Wi-Fi version camera version kernel version the build number is what we saw the update to so when you saw a lot of other sites that ran reviews on this very early after only having the device for you know 24 hours they did not have the most updated version of the build so go ahead and just want to give you a bit of perspective all right so you're getting all of this performance how is that going to affect battery life well asus is claiming battery life in the in the 12 ish our range I got an honest nine and a half hours and that was a nine and a half hours on about sixty percent brightness I wasn't trying to do anything that I wouldn't ordinarily do with the tablet I have three emails being pulled down pretty constantly pretty heavy web browsing obviously watch a lot of YouTube videos on here nine and a half hours maybe a little bit more but almost exactly nine and a half was really impressive for a quad-core tablet I don't actually heard that we're going to be checking out Tegra 3 my thought was decreased battery life more cores more power that companion court really makes all the difference battery life has been absolutely tremendous if you're going to use the keyboard dock you're going to get actually close to 16 hours of battery life so no need to worry about how long this guy's going to last in your bag let's talk a little bit about camera and I generally gloss over this when it comes to tablets and phones but there are some interesting things here so the camera quality and camera interface relatively standard here stuff that you would expect from glue and put something to frame at least from a modern tablet you get some settings where you can control expose your aspect ratio picture size and ISO you can choose your landscape go ahead and pick some effects here if you want you want to choose some flash settings I've got that set on auto where things really get interesting though is you switch on over to the video let me show you what we've got here now and video that little pie chart looking thing is actually time lapse you can take time lapse video which is kind of neat in different intervals of one second one and a half to all up to 60 seconds so let me show you what that looks like very quickly so here's the interface yet record that starts spin around and you can see what it's going to look like taking a essentially a shot every second I'm go and stop that I filmed one earlier let me show you what it looked like go ahead and jump on in there's one I filmed just filmed right now go ahead and hit the screen see we can find the right Road video there we go so this one was sped up at about one second and that was it so it looks like you just put it on quick speed but it's nice the processor can sort of do things like that I'm encouraged to see what else developers can do with this improved processing experience let's go ahead and jump back into the home screen and let's take a look at browsing let me go ahead and load up technobuffalo calm here and this is going to show you the keyboard which I am not the biggest fan of from a design standpoint it's not the prettiest keyboard but looks or one thing as far as function goes it's actually a very functional keyboard I do like having the full number rose and when you turn it sir squashes itself making it look almost like a giant phone keyboard but it does work very well that's more of a personal taste let me go ahead and check out TechnoBuffalo it we're on a pretty fast Wi-Fi connection here browsing was an average experience this is the one thing that I wasn't blown away with by the transformer prime it works it works okay it's not overly zippy or fast it's about average and I'm par with other honeycomb tablets while everything else the transformer prime does far as far as superior browsing a sort of an average experience could be a bit slow ECM trying to flick and scroll there and took a second for it to go one of the things i do like that asus did not doing moving my finger here for a reason on the right-hand side hopefully you can see that little up and down arrow that'll let me as i select it scroll grab it scroll up and down or defend to be very helpful considering sometimes the screen wasn't always working with my finger so something to bear in mind let's talk now about some of the asus widgets on aces for the most part left honey honey comb be honeycomb but really added some nice widgets that you can choose to use these are some of my favorite add-ons here too when I saw them first with the original transformer and they've gotten better here at the transformer prime first of all they're not in your face they're not giant they sort of fade into the background you can see three males with the date the weather and the location I liked it they don't have a giant border on them it's mostly a personal taste and that's that thing but I really liked how they looked something additions here you can see the battery and if you've got the keyboard dock plugged in I'll tell you what the battery you have on the keyboard dock is as well let me show you some of the other widgets that we've got in here they've got reminders you can have all your your images sort of show up here as well and of course you got the standard honeycomb widgets that are going to come here but I'll show you what the other options are and some of the other issues choices you can see just a few of them right there and then you get into the standard honeycomb widgets which become more and more useful as the days go by the more I use them the more I enjoy the ability to have would it all right so let's talk just a little bit about the keyboard dock because without it you can't really call this guy a transformer it's not transforming it to anything it just transforming to a tablet so this is the keyboard dock this entity is going to turn this into a full quasi functional laptop so I'll talk about this just a little bit and we'll do a follow up review of the keyboard dock $150 the keys are a little bit on the small side you know as you'd expect from something that sort of tablet size I to compare it to say the apple wireless keyboard you can see a little bit of difference there in the size that being said the keys have relatively decent throat to them it's a comfortable keyboard to type on I did while typing was writing up a couple articles my wrist did get to feel a little bit cramped the angle of typing I was a bit weird it's sort of smaller here so it wasn't much room for my wrist I had to almost prop them up a little bit that may be unique to me but doing a lot amount of typing I found it to be a bit uncomfortable one thing I did like though and i know this runs counter to some other things you may have read I enjoyed the trackpad I found it to work very well it was pretty smooth and the buttons here worked very very well whether or not I was clicking and I was able to scroll and pinch and zoom it says have multi touch capabilities here the best part about this tablet though at least in my opinion the best thing it does is it increases battery life to 16 hours and it's going to charge tablet while you are using it which is quite nice as well it's going to sort of kill its own battery to make sure your tablet can live a little bit longer and it just goes ahead and drops right in pull the camera up a little bit so you can see what things look like here go ahead and go home and I'm now have a little bit of a cursor hopefully you can follow it here it's right in the middle of the screen there those sixes are then go ahead and select it over you like so I want to jump the settings I can go ahead and jump into settings and I'm using two fingers to scroll I'll show you that here and the screen is scrolling so something to bear in mind is it worth 150 dollars probably I wouldn't run out to buy the keyboard dock doesn't add a giant amount of bulk I would recommend this though for students who want to use this as perhaps a laptop replacement and really need and improved battery it's not overly ugly you do get a full-size living on this side SD card slot and go ahead and pop in full size SD cards and perhaps even more importantly in a reason why you may want to consider this as you're going to get a full USB port there as well so go ahead pull this out of the keyboard dock and we'll continue the review and we want to eject it just slide this thing over and pull your tablet right out of the top and again that did add to about 16 hours of total battery life so if battery life is important to you or one of those reasons I mentioned you're going to want to consider this so I'm sure you can surmise at this point what my opinions and feelings are of the transformer prime it is a tremendous tablet and if I was in the market for a tablet right now and if i was looking to recommend a tablet to my audience which obviously i am i would be hard-pressed to say don't look at the transformer prime it is a absolutely great experience perhaps one of the best tablets on the market so whether or not you were considering an Android tablet or not as you're doing your cross shopping give this guy look it's future is going to be even brighter with ice cream sandwich but its present it's pretty darn good it's the fastest honeycomb experience I've seen I enjoyed using the tab was able to keep up with me pretty demanding on my tablets overall it has been an absolutely wonderful experience and I give the Asus Transformer Prime two very very very big and enthusiastic thumbs up if this is what we can expect from Tegra 3 and this is sort of an example of what we can see from Nvidia coming soon I am extremely encouraged by what we're going to get from the folks at asu's it's a beautiful design the back is made of a brushed metal despite my national thought that might be plastic and actually is metal it's got a bit of an industrial design it's thin I love the tapered look and feel of it screen though is a little bit of a fingerprint magnet but most tablets are so don't bring your pizza hands close this guy or you're never going to see that screen look the way it should a few hiccups oh you know the screen responsiveness was definitely an issue something that will hopefully be fixed with an upcoming firmware update we had some issues initially getting to the doc there are two rubber pieces that were really wedged in there nice and tight with no directions need to be removed but consider this a heads up it got to remove them but all in all very small gripes for an absolutely wonderful tablet i am jon rettinger from TechnoBuffalo and this has been a full review of the asus eee pad transformer prime for all of our asus eee pad transformer prime coverage of course check us out at TechnoBuffalo com we have unboxing reviews hands-on rumors and a ton of other great content and I'll see you guys in the next video bye bye you