Gadgetory

today's unboxing is going to be a tablet accessory but probably the most compelling tablet accessory that has yet to exist so no I'm not talking about you know cute little carrying cases or jewel-encrusted well carrying cases er I mean really that seems to be what most tablet accessories are these days is carrying cases but no this is the transformer prime well II pad transformer prime keyboard dock attachment and this is the black or gray or whatever they want to call it it's that color it's not the other color so that goes with the transformer prime that I have here so you can see there's a couple of logos on here we've got HDMI powered by nvidia tegra a Tegra 3 mind you although that's not in the keyboard attachment itself so what is the keyboard attachment itself well it does a few things one it's a keyboard okay so that part is fairly self-explanatory there's the keyboard aspect of it too it is like remember those old docking stations that you used to get the old notebooks that had like additional expansion like they'd have a parallel port for your printer and stuff like that well this is kind of like that as well because it has additional i/o including actually you know we'll go through the additional i/o later and then last but not least it also has an additional supplementary battery so okay what asus has to say is dock and charge the pad for up to 18 hours of battery life that seems a little optimistic especially based on what I've seen so far but what it does do is once you plug it into your transformer prime it does charge the primes battery off of the battery that is on the keyboard rock itself which is very very cool so we got a touchpad we get a keyboard we get some additional IO and we get additional battery life how can you go wrong well there's one way to go wrong no unfortunately your old keyboard dock is not compatible with the new transformer and your new transformer keyboard dock is not Trenton under work hmm no okay so your new keyboard dock is not compatible with the oldest transformer so why don't we have a closer look at it so you're gonna see it's got a great finish to it I mean the transformer prime is just leagues ahead of the original transformer in terms of the overall build quality check out the brushed metal finish here let's have a look at the keyboard layout itself actually so we've got correctly positioned shift keys correctly position enter long backspace overall no complaints it's a chiclet style keyboard very short travel distances on these keys but that is to be expected because the last thing you want is high profile keys that are gonna stand a chance of scratching your keypad or scratching your screen when you have the thing closed the hinge looks like it's very high quality you can see it's quite difficult for me to move it right now but once the the transformer Prime's on there giving the additional leverage it should be fine very solid metal construction though so every part of the hinge should be very very robust there's the lock button so oh yeah I'm guessing that moves once I actually plug something into it and you can see the transformer prawns a Seuss's proprietary docking connector right down there you've also got a number of hot keys so instead of F keys we've replaced all of those with just pure hot key so you don't actually have to hold down a function key in order to make it happen so we've got you know your wireless Bluetooth brightness up brightness down auto brightness it's not really the internet button because that looks an awful lot like an internet explorer thing but I'm sure they prefer you use Chrome full QWERTY keyboard and touchpad easy file sharing with Bilson ah SD cards in USB so I want to show you guys the improved i/o so what we got here this is a you okay whatever it's labeled that's a USB port right over here is a full sized SD card slot on the other side we have okay right so that replaces the dock connector on the bottom of the transformer prime when it's plugged into the to the base station so that's how you'll charge both the keyboard dock as well as the transformer prime once they are connected together I want you guys to check out the bottom I've put a couple of finger prints on it already but you know how it is so there's your brushed metal finish even on the bottom of the device so a Seuss has really taken a page out of Apple's book when it comes to finishing every aspect of the device in as beautiful away as possible rather than sort of what I would consider to be more like the traditional PC approach which is to take the underside of things like a notebook and not really worry too much about them so I'm just taking out these rubber inserts and I'm going to go ahead and plug the transformer Prime into the docking station so with the actual intended tablet this should be far less difficult than it was when I was trying to do it with the wrong ones you're just gonna make sure you have it lined up right there it goes it locks into place and then all you got to do is boot this bad boy up and it should be detected in a pretty yeah there we go docking connected you skip you got to be kidding me there's the instructions use keyboard to type words thank you google and isus for that so I just wanted to show you guys what the profile of the device is like you know what actually give me a sec I'll be right back so it occurs to me I want to show you guys the profile of the device compared to the older Asus Transformer which is right here so you can see that even with the keyboard dock the new transformer isn't that much thicker than the old transformer which is very very cool asus has done a fantastic job with the transformer prime now you compare it to something like this is a first generation Acer Aspire one look how thin it is compared to a netbook this netbook with the battery it has which is not a six cell battery is only capable of about two hours of battery life whereas the transformer prime is capable of well over fourteen hours of battery life once you include the extra keyboard dock the last thing I want to compare it to in terms of its size once you put the keyboard on is the iPad 2 just because it's kind of the de facto standard for tablet comparisons I want to make sure that I have it in there so you guys have a clearer idea oh it's even more broken than it was before what a bummer that's that crack keeps spreading I might have to might have to get that glass replaced so there is the profile compared to the iPad 2 so here we go transformer one iPad 2 transformer Prime with Tegra 3 and the additional keyboard dock thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the keyboard dock and this beautiful little piece of machinery from a soos don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos