Gadgetory

welcome to a very exciting unboxing and first look this is the e Pad Transformer crime and based on everything that I already know about this tablet I am extremely excited to have a look at it so I've got a few other tablets here for me with me for comparison so I've got the ASA sense of these who says the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 I've got the Asus Transformer original and then I've also got an iPad 2 in its little snug case there which I'll take off for a closer comparison check this up so the first thing I notice about the box is a nice foamy insert which is gonna make sure that that screen doesn't get damaged in any way during transit very very high hopes for this tablet so let's check out the packaging here Rumbles gonna help us so the first thing we find here are some of the outstanding benefits offered cool so incredibly slim yes this is the slimmest tablet yet ultra performance with the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad core and that's a bit of a misnomer because it actually has five cores one of which is a low powered core for when the tablet is not really doing much silky smooth 3d gaming HD video playing up to 1080p all on Google's use there friendly and upgradable Android OS it's funny they mentioned upgradable because it will be compatible with Ice Cream Sandwich moving forward although it does come with honeycomb unrivaled visual acuity so this super IPS plus panel actually it is according to what I've heard so far even better than what was my previous favorite tablet panel which was the one on the the PLS panel on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 some very excited to check that out supreme sound so as soon as they've put in improved audio performance okay unlimited productivity with the yeah with the dock which I'll be checking out later so there's the transformer prime dock just like the original transformer you can add more battery life as well as full QWERTY keypad and some additional IO so that's pretty cool hey check this out this doesn't come with like a cheesy microfiber cloth with an actual proper textured one that's gonna like look at this I actually like this number years back this looks like almost exactly the same as the one I bought way back when my neighborhoods very similar this is really really old and ratty and this one to do so you can clean off your tablet with that it also comes with what appears to be the same charger that comes with the original transformer so actually I'll check it out what do we got here yeah hey soos something or other yep looks like the same thing and as you can see it's a potent cat toy which you shouldn't be playing with that all right what else we got for accessories I think that's pretty much it so it's a fairly bear package you've got your cleaning cloth you got your little instructional doodad you got your charger and you've got what is obviously the most important piece the actual epad transformer crime so let's check this out first thing we want to do is take off this plastic sheeting so this already looks very familiar to me this looks a lot like the Zen book which is just a beautiful piece of computer hardware so I love the finish here it's got kind of a concentric circle thing going on with like a brushed metal finish nice shiny Asus logo right in the middle there overall the machine is quite light compared to the original transformer that was one of the things that made me sort of less of a fan of the transformer because in spite of the good form factor it really had some heft to it this one is definitely significantly lighter that's also one of the things that I don't like that much about the iPad 2 it's a very very heavy device and for a tablet it becomes very relevant if you're gonna be yeah it's actually quite light I don't think it's as light as the Galaxy Tab 10.1 hold on wow this is really light even in spite of the fact that it has feels a little heavier I'll have to weigh them when I do my proper follow-up on this on my NCIX Khan channel but yeah it feels quite quite light indeed very nice form factor but yeah okay sorry what I was saying so yeah when you're like you know laying and dad watching movie or reading a book or whatever the weight becomes very very important so what else we got on the back here we have a flash and the 8 megapixel camera and then you've got one speaker on the transformer prime this feels like a bit of a step backwards to me given that the original transformer had two speakers one on the right-hand side and one on the left-hand side on the edges there but you know what it doesn't bother me that much when I'm using the iPad 2 which only has one speaker as well so I guess I'll let it slide this time let's have a look at what we've got for i/o on the device itself there's your standard headphone jack up at the top we find a whole lot of nothing except a microphone we've got our on/off standby button our rocker switch for volume that looks hold on is that that looks like micro HDMI but I could be wrong give me a sec I'll double-check that for you guys and then oh that could be a microphone as well interesting okay I don't know what that is either but this is definitely a microSD slot which is awesome because that in my mind already makes the transformer prime aside from the price point because yes the transformer prime is more expensive than the original transformer but instead of starting at a 16 gig model at 399 it starts at a 32 gig model at $4.99 which is fine because the transformer when it launched was $4.99 for the 32 impede model anyway so now we see a 32 gig model and a 64 instead of a 16 and a 32 so let's actually turn this baby on oh yeah the dock down here at the bottom sorry I wasn't quite done yet what do these oh you know what these are probably fir up yeah these are for docking to the keyboard the keyboard which actually acts not only as a keyboard but an extended battery I think I already mentioned that so there's our serial number here's a little plastic thing you don't have to leave that on we can get rid of that if we want I would probably not keep that on the device so it's booting up right now so let's talk a little bit about the Tegra 3 processor oh yeah we've got our front webcam here as well our front camera so take a three processor so it's a quad-core CPU plus Nvidia has also significantly upgraded the GPU so it is substantially more powerful than the Tegra 2 which was pretty much the only processor that you found in most of the first generation and tablets with Android Honeycomb right so I mentioned that it's quad-core but there's a fifth course so your four cores are going to turn on or turn off or be clocked higher o'clock lower depending on the profiles you set depending on the load that you're running and then there's an additional one core that can run just as a super low-power state and the all the other four ones are off so that's why it's actually a five core processor nvidia has also significantly upgraded the GPU horsepower so CPU is better and more faster and there are more and the GPU is much more powerful so okay one thing that I've noticed right away about this title that I'm just going to key in the password to my my SSID here okay there we go one thing I've noticed about it right away is I don't know if you can see this in this light but I can see the touchscreen interface a little bit I can see the grid of dots it's not that noticeable it only really you know what it only really comes out if I catch the light that's up there on the ceiling and it shines directly off the tablet into my eyes I can kind of see the dots around it but it's definitely not as noticeable as something like the Motorola Xoom or the Toshiba Thrive both of those have very very noticeable touch screen overlays so this is sort of what I would say is about middle of the road in terms of the visibility of it I can't see it a little bit so let's just get that let's get this booted up I just want to check out the overall responsiveness of the unit so one of the things that I've really heard said about the transformer prime is that all of the kind of nonsense slowness that's been associated with Android tablets is pretty much gone because here I mean come on let's compare it to something like an iPad 2 where the user interface is so slick I mean look at that it just kind of seamlessly goes from okay the air video one is at the bottom left oh boom now it's at the bottom right how did that happen whoa holy cow so it's a very very smooth user interface experience and that's something that my expectation is that yes throwing more CPU and GPU horsepower at the problem is a good way to address it definitely looks better I mean look at this you can see how quickly and how smoothly it transitions now but Ice Cream Sandwich is also supposed to address that in a very very big way as well so when you compare that to the transformer so you see that leg you see that their first generation try the first generation Android tablets really didn't feel up I mean I'd say the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was probably the slickest feeling out of all of them but they didn't really quite have that same feel as the Apple device and it looks like it was a combination of hardware and software so now we finally got the hardware that's going to be a lot more competitive with the processor in the iPad 2 we've got a screen that looks very very vibrant and let's actually go ahead and look at that so they've really increased the brightness of the screen compared to the transformer looks like a very very similar but slightly different sort of take on the desktop wallpaper that we were using on the original yeah so brightness is way up hard to evaluate color is based on sort of my initial impressions here they have made some significant changes to the menu right here though so we've got a bunch of different stuff including your eco mode so turning on power saving mode turning on balance mode turning on normal speed mode you can lock your orientation or not lock your orientation look how quickly the responses on this though compared to previous Android tablets we're navigating through menus really feels like a bit of a chore Wi-Fi on Wi-Fi off let's see how quickly it connect to my can connect to my Wi-Fi my browser working yet that's nice that's one of the things that I really like about the iPad 2 is that when you are in range of your wireless it's like boom it's on it's on so let's go and see I XCOM see how quickly that loads up I'm sitting right next to my hotspot so this should be pretty much a best-case scenario I'm on a broadband 50 so that's a 50 megabit per second internet fine go to the forum let's read the forum's very very nice to look at overall though I mean look at the okay I apologize because you guys aren't really going to be able to see this but the contrast between this black and this white is just outstanding like this looks like the deepest of deep blacks it almost looks like part of the frame more than it looks like part of the screen that is just amazing so far I'm very impressed with the screen though scrolling is nice and quick let's see zooming because that's one of the things that I really felt was totally not the best experience with the the first generation of Android tablets so oh there's no internet connection let's get that address okay just a sec I'll be back guys okay so here's the transformer I've got the same page loaded so zooming in actually feels a little bit better than it used to there was a recent system update I wonder if that kind of addressed some of my concerns but it's still not quite there with something like the iPad 2 which just feels so silky smooth when you're zooming around let me look at that okay so we're not quite there but that's more of like a software thing that hopefully will be addressed with Ice Cream Sandwich let's wrap this up and we have just like a general physical comparison now I just love this thing physically actually like I love it physically no no I don't mean it's a machine it's just it's taboo still you know give it another couple hundred years and maybe we'll be having a different conversation so let's look at the yeah let's look at the overall format compared to V and iPad 2 so I'm just gonna lay this down on top of it so the iPad 2 is still not a 16 by 10 screen which is horrible and needs to just die in a fire hopefully that's something Apple will address with their next tablet so you can see we do have a significantly more wide screen screen which is great for watching your media content whether it's on YouTube or whether it's over network or you put your media files on here onto micro SD which iPad 2 doesn't have very frustrating because I do like the iPad whole let's talk about the glass right Gorilla Glass so as some of you know I recently broke my iPad - so my screen is cracked all the way from here to here and then all the way from here over to here it's pretty pretty wrecked which has made me fairly unhappy so this uses Corning ware Gorilla Glass which should make it about as scratch proof and break proof and everything proof as possible so that's that's something to bear in mind guys that actually there's a great demo that a soos has on YouTube of the original transformer where they take keys and objects and try to scratch the glass and then they show you the results at the end so that's that's outstanding and that's something if you've ever had a tablet that's broken then okay it might be a factor for you so let's have a look at the format compared to the original transformer which is pretty darn similar look at that they've reduced the width a little bit which is really nice although it is a little bit more okay so let's call this the one we call this the link so it's a little bit shorter lengthwise but it's a little bit wider okay however the screen size is pretty much the same so what they've done is they've lost some of this bezel space around here and then they've increased a little bit of the bezel space around the top let's check out the thickness so thickness was one of the ones one of the things where the original transformer really didn't stack up well against his comp so yeah the original transformer really didn't stack up that well thickness wise you can see compared to the ipad 2 against the original transformer and then these there's a transformer prime against the original transformer so I'm gonna go ahead and put the ipad 2 next to the transformer prime so you can see the thick that's really really close okay so a su says it's the thinnest I guess I'll have to take their word for it but these all look really really close to me so here's the ipad2 transformer prime and Galaxy Tab 10.1 so yes this was HDMI over here so that's micro HDMI so what asus has done here is they've receipt they've produced a trap tablet that this was my favorite android Tegra 2 tablet the Galaxy Tab 10.1 no secret I love the screen love the form factor love the weight however no microSD no HDMI output done like you lose the benefit of going with the Google platform in my in my personal opinion by removing those features because that's a huge selling point for me versus something like an iPad 2 where you have to have like a weird dongle to do HDMI output or you get a USB port or whatever the case may be so the transformer prime takes that form factor fits in a micro HDMI fits in a micro SD slot and is still very very lightweight great looking screen so far but I'm going to spend some more time with it hopefully in the next little bit great piece of glass and I think we've pretty much got a winner here folks so thanks for checking out my unboxing and first look at the transformer prime don't forget to subscribe client tech tip from one of boxing's reviews and other computer video