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Welcome to WhatTabletPC.com review of the Asus EEE Pad Transformer Prime.
Today what I’m going to do is just give you a run over of the tablet in its entirety
and then also the keyboard dock that comes with the tablet. So first up what I’m going
to show you is the Transformer Prime, it’s just been released in the UK in January 2012
and it’s certainly one of the most powerful tablets available in the market to date. It’s
also one of the most stylish tablets. Let me move the keyboard out of the way and
we’ll just have a look at the tablet itself. First up, it’s very thin and you can get
an idea of how thin it is, that’s certainly comparable to an iPad or to a Samsung Galaxy
Tab 10.1 in the kind of thinnest tablets that are available on the market. It’s also very
light, again comparable to those kind of light tablets, again, very stylish, got this kind
of thick bezel around the edge here, but looks good.
Now, if I run into a bit more about the actual tablet itself, now one of the key selling
features of this table is that it runs an NVidia Tegra 3 processor. Now what that means
is that it’s one of the most advanced processors available for tablets and certainly the most
powerful processor that’s available for tablets at the moment. And that means that
the tablet itself is very quick to respond to taps and swipes, as you can see, as I move
between some of the screens, but also it runs full HD video, quite capable of playing HD
video and web video, particularly in Flash format, and also deals with quite complex
3-D games. So real sort of graphical detail in those games comparable with what you’ll
get on a PC. Now, it also runs Android 3.2 and there is
a promise upgrade to Android 4 when that’s available for tablets pretty soon. So that’s
the most advanced kind of tablet operating system from Android, the Google’s operating
system and it’s pretty well polished now, although there should be further improvements
coming fairly quickly. The screen is a 10 inch multi-touch super
IPS panel and that means it’s very responsive, it’s bright, it’s vivid and some great
viewing angles, so even if you’re looking at it from a quite wide angle you’re still
get some decent kind of contrast, so you can still look at it fairly well and view it fairly
easily. It’s also made of gorilla glass so that means it’s pretty durable and pretty
robust. Now, if we move on we’ll have a look at
the other features we’ve got on the back here, this is kind of a brushed metal back
so it’s pretty stylish again. It does pick up the odd sort of smudge etcetera and is
susceptible to scratches so maybe just keep an eye on that stuff. We’ve also got an
8 million megapixel camera here and a flash, so that’s capable of taking HD video and
it’s also capable of taking some pretty decent still photographs.
On the front here we’ve got a 1.2 million megapixel webcam that’s capable of doing
web chat type stuff on Skype and there’s also quite a few other options on this, so
say, for example, it runs a Sonic Master technology for enhanced audio quality, so that should
improve if you’re listening to music etcetera on there. You can see there’s a speaker,
you can just about see there, so it’s a stereo speaker tablet PC.
Now let me just swing this back—get it back there—we’ve jumped into a slightly different
mode there, we’ll pull that back up. What I’m also going to show you is how it reacts
with the keyboard dock, let’s move the tablet out of the way. This is the keyboard dock
and in the UK you can only actually by the tablet with the keyboard dock included and
they’re not sold separately. Depending on where you’re looking at this from, you might
be able to find the tablet separately without the keyboard dock.
This is quite a unique feature, what it allows you to do is slide the tablet into the keyboard
dock and it’s clicked in there, and now you have is effectively kind of like a netbook.
So you can use the keyboard to type, we’ve got other kind of apps and straight away as
soon as I’ve clicked the tablet into the keyboard, you’ve got a cursor come up and
you can use this track pad to navigate the tablet. You’ve also got a number of different
options across the top here that allow you to do things like a key to go backwards, to
turn Wi-Fi on and off, change the brightness of the screen, take photos, of whatever is
on the screen and other things like play buttons, forward, rewind of the music you’re working
on, turn the sound on and off, lock the tablet, etcetera—a lot of different options there.
You’ve got the QWERTY keyboard and you’ve got things like, let’s have a look at—oh,
one thing I forgot to mention is you can still use the touch screen, so you can still navigate
in that manner. So, for example, the Asus Transformer Prime ships with Polaris Office
so you do things like word processing with this sort of Microsoft Office equivalent and
there’s a few other bits and pieces you may find useful, so it gives you sort of more
options for content creation and more sort work options rather than just a kind media
consumption device that a lot of tablets are aimed at.
So the actual keyboard itself—let’s pop that top back off—you can see it’s quite
easy to slide that in and out of the keyboard. If you look at the actual keyboard, you can
see that it’s quite thin, and pretty lightweight. You’ve got a kind of a charge button here,
this is sort of a charge socket that allows you to charge it from the mains. The actual
keyboard itself holds about six hours’ worth of charge. Now you add that on to the 12 hours
that Asus will tell us the tablet itself is capable of and you’ve got up to 18 hours
of charge. Now that’s measured on continuous video playback and an average brightness with
Wi-Fi on, but it will sort of depend what you’re actually doing with the tablet. But
at least it gives you some more idea of the kind of options that this tablet gives you.
You’ve also got on the keyboard dock itself a full SD card slot, which allows you to easily
add photos from your camera, if you’ve got an SD-type camera, or videos, etcetera, you
can store anything really on an SD card. You’ve also got here a USB port so you can easily
add peripherals or a USB stick if you want to get files on and off the tablet that way.
Of course it requires the tablet to be docked when you’re doing these kinds of things
to actually get it on to the tablet, but it’s another option and certainly not many other
tablets offer that kind of functionality. So that’s the keyboard dock.
Let’s have a quick look again back at the tablet itself. So as we talked about earlier,
it runs Android 3.2, it’s a pretty advanced operating system on that basis. One thing
to note, there have been some instances so far of GPS issues and certainly I’d say
the mapping function, when I’ve used it, hasn’t been that good unless you’ve got
Wi-Fi connected, so that’s something to be just aware of. It’s questionable whether
those issues will be resolved in future updates or not, but it’s something to be aware of.
So just flicking through, I mean, basically you’ve kind of got a home screen here that
gives you quick access to a web browser, the YouTube app so you can watch YouTube videos,
a camera app so you can take photos and also sort of HD videos, if you want to do that
sort of stuff. The gallery allows you to look quickly at the images you’ve got and snapshots
that you’ve taken, quickly navigate back here. I mentioned about the YouTube app, so
here you go. We’re attached to Wi-Fi currently you can see how quick it kind of loads up,
you can scroll through and pick out the YouTube videos you want or search for whatever you’re
looking for. Similarly the browser, I’ve got the BBC home page loaded up here and it
works perfectly fine. If I jump on to, let’s have a look at some sports, hopefully we should
be able to see a video, I’ll show you that the Flash works quite happily in the browser
or in the iPlayer. We’re not automatically getting some so let’s jump back to one of
the home pages and I’ll show you how it quickly flips over to the iPlayer for the
BBC stuff if you’re actually looking at TV—just having some issues there—let’s
go back to the iPlayer itself on the home screen. So now we’ll just quickly jump on there—as you can see it’s quite
happy playing stuff here, I’ve got the volume turned down at the moment just so I can get
this review done quickly without interruptions. But it’s quite happily working and like
I say, the quality of the processor supports this.
Right, if we navigate back here, we’ve rather got things like notes here, a music app to
allow you to quickly play your music, you can load music on there, you can purchase
music from the Android Market, and here’s the Android Market itself so you can quickly
jump into buying apps, if you want, or books or movies, basically whatever you want it’s
fairly straight forward to find whatever you’re looking for, you can search for what you want
to buy. And if we run back there, you’ve also got mail set up—I’ve just quickly
set up a dummy mail here—but you can see that’s pretty straight forward.
Also, this is kind of a feature Asus has added themselves, MyZine, which gives you quick
access to some of your key content, if you’ve been looking at anything recently like music,
websites, it’ll give you access to those and also parade through your images that you’ve
already taken with the tablet or you’ve loaded on. Other bits of software included
are Polaris Office software, which I mentioned, which is a Microsoft Office equivalent. You’ve
got My Library, which is an eReader book app and we’ll look at these in a bit more detail
in other videos. You’ve got various other things, you’ve
got a cloud service which allows you to upload content to the cloud and then review it whenever
you’re in location near a Wi-Fi signal, which means you’ve got a bit more option
in terms of storage rather than keeping everything on the tablet. There’s mapping and other
kinds of options like file manager, and you can quickly change the settings, etcetera,
from this screen. Now, I’m not going to go into too much more
detail in this video here, but I hope that gives you a good overview of the Asus Transformer
Prime is capable of and we’ll have a bit more detail in future videos.
That’s it for this video for WhatTabletPC.com. If you want to learn more about this Transformer
Prime and other tablet PCs available now plus buying advice, sign up to our email list at
WhatTabletPC.com and you’ll get updates as they become available.