The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is a 10.1-inch Android tablet, sold with a matching keyboard that it can be docked with to form an ultra-portable laptop.
Tablet/laptop hybrids are not a new concept: they’ve been around since the early days of awkward Windows-powered tablets with pen-driven swivelling screens. That swivel-screen mechanism can also be seen on a few contemporary and upcoming touch-screen laptops.
Asus’ approach with the Eee Pad Transformer Prime is far simpler and offers much greater flexibility. With just a quick slide of a single lock button, the entire screen can be removed from the keyboard – leaving you with a slim and lightweight (8.3mm/586g) Android tablet.
The body of both halves is almost entirely metallic, and the screen is covered in Corning’s Gorilla Glass. The build therefore has a very solid, ‘high quality’ feel, and neither tablet nor keyboard will torque or flex substantially under pressure.
The 1280 x 800-pixel IPS screen is bright and crisp, and can be switched between ‘IPS Mode’ and ‘Super IPS+ Mode’. The latter is intended for outdoor use, and boosts the brightness while correspondingly decreasing battery life. Colours are rich and accurate, and the screen’s only downside is the degree to which it attracts fingerprints.
A micro HDMI port lets you output video to a TV or HDMI-capable monitor. You can also connect a larger screen, which meant I could use the Transformer as a desktop, thanks to a USB hub with mouse and keyboard attached. Sure, you could do this with any Android tablet, but the Transformer’s form factor and processing power really lend themselves to it.
The Transformer’s audio quality and maximum volume are both noticeably above average for such a slimline device. Strangely, the headphone socket is cut awkwardly into the sloping right edge of the tablet, and leaves a good 5mm of plug visible at the rear when you’ve got headphones or speakers connected. Technically it’s not an issue, but aesthetically it conflicts with the otherwise slick and practical design.
You’ll find a 1.2MP front-facing camera for video conferencing, and a functional but unremarkable 8MP camera at the rear. Taking photos with any tablet is an odd experience, but it all works as you’d expect.
The Transformer is advertised as running Android 3.2 (Honeycomb), upgradeable to 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). Our review model came pre-loaded with 4.0, which runs beautifully on the tablet’s Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core CPU with 1GB of RAM.
Tested with the freely available AnTuTu benchmark, the Asus Transformer Prime outperforms all other tablets by nearly 50%. It blows away its Android-based competition, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Motorola Xoom, and Acer Iconia Tab. Whether or not you care about the keyboard, the Transformer Prime is a high-performance Android-based tablet.
The keyboardAll the big name tablet devices have Bluetooth-connected or dockable keyboards available, but we’ve yet to see anything so tightly integrated as the Transformer’s keyboard. Rather than a snap-on accessory, it’s part of the tablet that just happens to be removable.
A netbook-sized keyboard is invaluable, but simply adding a keyboard does not make for an accomplished word-processor. The included Polaris Office suite works well with the keyboard, and it's both much faster than typing on the screen, and far less prone to mistakes. However editing text is awkward, particularly moving it around using the arrow keys. There’s no way to select text using the keyboard, and ‘pro’ shortcuts such as using Ctrl+Left/Right Arrow to jump from word to word are sadly absent. The universal ‘Ctrl+Z’ to undo is there, but nothing so useful as Ctrl+A to select all, or Ctrl+S to save. For that, your hands keep flying back down to the touchpad or up to the screen.
I tested two commercial word processor alternatives, Documents To Go and OfficeSuite Pro. The former allows you to select text using Shift+Left/Right arrow, but only OfficeSuite offers the full set of text editing shortcuts that Android supports, including Ctrl+Left/Right to move from word to word. It also has the most polished, desktop-app-like feel of the three office suites I tested, and is well worth its US$19 price. After all, what’s the point in having a full keyboard if you don’t have a good word processor?
Key travel is minimal, but the island keys are well delineated and I rarely found myself hitting the wrong letter. However, occasionally I failed to press hard enough, or my keystrokes weren’t registered for whatever reason, and I ended up with a few missing letters. If you’re used to typing on a tiny netbook keyboard, or something like the 11-inch MacBook Air, you may have better luck than I did in that area.
Battery lifeBattery life is exceptional, thanks to a clever design decision on Asus’s part. All of the processing power is contained within the tablet, leaving the keyboard effectively a dead weight. However, Asus cramed a secondary battery in there, too. When the tablet is docked into the keyboard, it charges from that secondary battery (which, in turn, you can charge from the mains via the tablet’s power adapter). Together, these are advertised as giving the Transformer up to 18 hours of battery life (up to 12 hours without the dock). That’s really a bit of a stretch, but using the Transformer as my only PC while travelling, I did manage to get a couple of 8-hour workdays before requiring a recharge.
One interesting and significant annoyance is the way the power button sits on the top of the screen in ‘laptop mode’, on a backward-curving edge. I found that when using the Transformer in an economy-class plane seat, the screen resting against the back of the seat in front of me kept pressing the power button. This caused the tablet to go to sleep while I was writing. I also managed to put the tablet to sleep in the middle of notetaking a fair few times with the on-keyboard ‘lock’ button, which is in the upper rightmost corner, directly above the backspace key – something I found myself hitting fairly often to correct those missing characters or the occasional misspelt word.
The Transformer Prime is not perfect; nor is it even particularly novel. Again, a vast number of dockable keyboards exist for the iPad and the more common Android tablets on the market. On the other hand it’s sleek, attractive, extremely powerful, flexible and useful. The price is the only downside really worth noting. If you just want a tablet with a keyboard, there are cheaper ways to get one. If you want a true tablet/laptop combo with the portability of the former and power of the latter, the Transformer Prime is right up your alley.
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