Primed for Perfection

With the unveil of ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime by head honcho Jonney Shih at last month’s AsiaD conference, the tech community has waited on bated breath in anticipation of just what this next generation tablet has in store for its eager fans. Well the wait is finally over.

Now that the specs are out, we can get up close and personal with the Prime and spill all its pretty little secrets. The first thing that you’ll notice about the Prime is the fact that it looks absolutely gorgeous, coming in two colors: Amethyst Gray and Champagne Gold. Its super thin 8.3mm frame weighing only 865g makes it one of the thinnest and lightest tablets, and with an exterior that’s reminiscent of the Zenbook design, the metallic spun finish gives the Prime a solid and comfortable grip that you won’t want to put down.

With a fingerprint resistant coating that’s on both the screen and backside, it’ll remain looking great even after extended use. Speaking of the screen, that’s been given an update as well, to a new Super IPS+ mode that will still deliver up to 178° viewing angles, but at a brightness that’s much brighter than other tablets on the market. Moving around the edges, the Prime has a MicroSD card slot, Micro HDMI output, volume rocker, power button, 3.5mm combo audio jack and 40 pin connector port, while 1.2MP and 8MP  cameras are sported on the front and rear, respectively. While most people probably haven’t taken a lot of photos with their tablet, that may change with the Transformer Prime. The 8MP camera is packing some serious heat, with a large F/2.4 aperture and a back illuminated CMOS sensor that enhances color quality by 30% and reduces photo noise by 80%. But wait, there’s more! It also has the ability to record HD video in 1080p! Damn that’s sexy.

Inside, NVIDIA’s new Tegra 3 CPU acts as the Matrix of Leadership and turns the Transformer into the Prime version we see before us. The new quad-core CPU is pushing the boundaries of mobile computing, rivaling power found on current generation consoles and even some desktop PCs. With all this power, must come great responsibility sacrifice on battery life. Not so, with the super-secret (ok, not so secret) ultra low power 5th core that’s on the Tegra 3. For less strenuous tasks, the 4 main cores idle and the 5th core takes over for functions like push updates from email, twitter, etc., saving a good deal of battery life. So good in fact, that you’ll be able to use the Transformer Prime for up to 12 hours on a single charge. Not too shabby, considering that’ll get you across the Pacific with some battery life to spare. Combine it with the mobile dock, and you’ve got yourself up to 18 hours of tablet usage between charges. But that’s not the only thing you’ll get when you dock it. The virtual keyboard is good enough to use, but when you really need to pound out emails, nothing will beat a physical keyboard. With the mobile dock, you get a full sized QWERTY keyboard, a touchpad with multi-touch input, a USB port as well as a SD card reader to load on photos from a digital camera.

Coming in a 32GB or 64GB configuration, other nifty features like an upgraded speaker system powered by ASUS SonicMaster, preinstalled apps SuperNote and Polaris Office only add on to take mobile computing experience to a new level. And priced at $499/$599, this is a serious contender to dominate not only the Android tablet market, but the overall tablet market. Now, we’ll play the waiting game again, and see exactly what happens when the Transformer Prime gets an injection of Ice Cream Sandwich into its system in early December. I just wish it was powered with Optimus graphics as well. Then it would be perfect.