Posted by: nbaground on: January 25, 2010
Android tablets have come a long way since the early days of bodged smartphone OSes and horrid resistive screens, but there hasn't been very much improvement since the first Honeycomb tablets hit the shelves in spring this year. That's gonna change, however, with the brand new Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime.
This is the follow up to the original Transformer and improves on its design hugely. Gone is the slightly cheap plasticky finish of the original, to be swapped out by a more slimmer, sexier body. The new Transformer bears the very same spun aluminium finish as the firm's sleek Zenbooks, and it looks and feels lovely.
It's as thin as the market leaders, and very light with it too: the tablet on its own weighs 594g. Actually, the new Transformer cedes not a single ground to its competitors; which you pick will come down to personal taste.
Of course, half the point of buying the Transformer in the first place is its ingenious keyboard dock, the ability you'll find nowhere else. It, too, has got a redesign, to match the design of the tablet, with keys that have less travel as well as a firmer base.
The dock mechanism feels as solid and long lasting as it did originally, engaging with a positive click, with a smooth and cultured hinge action.
Merge that with its booster battery, as well as a USB port that lets you connect a keyboard or USB thumb drive (we checked both NTFS- and FAT32-formatted sticks and both allowed us to read and write files), and you have a very strong-looking package.
Handsome though the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime undoubtedly is, the main attraction is what's under the hood. This tablet is the first to feature the new generation of tablet processors: Nvidia's Tegra 3, which gives a number of significant developments over the dual-core Tegra 2.
The headline figure is clearly the new chip's quad-core 1.3GHz processing power, but yet that doesn't reveal the full story, because technically Tegra 3 has five cores, and it's the fifth core that really makes the difference.
Nvidia calls this the "companion" core. It's low power - running at only 500MHz - and the Transformer uses this core the majority of the time. While in standby, syncing emails as well as other messages, running low-intensity background chores, reading web pages, it's the companion core doing all the work. It can even deal with local video playback when the initial load has taken place.
The only time those four 1.3GHz cores fire up is during high-intensity tasks such as gaming and HD video streaming, launching apps and loading web pages. The rest of the time, they're simply idle, allowing the companion core to get on with the nearly all the work. See the video below for Nvidia's information.
Additionally, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime puts some control over clock pace under user control: "Balanced" and "Battery saver" modes allow you to manually turn down the wick on the processor, while a "Super IPS " switch encourages you to use the brightest screen setting only when you're outside in bright sunlight.
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