The Transformer Prime 'Real-user' Review: Part 1 - "A first time for everything..."

Prologue...

The Transformer Prime with optional dock.

This is my first ever media tablet review. In order to review it, I had to work out how - you have to understand what it's supposed to do if you're to determine how well it does it and that, my friends, is not as easy as it sounds when you say it fast.

For background, I took time to read web articles and talked to friends and family about their expectations for tablets. I read blog posts and Wikis and encouraged people to play with the Prime. I looked at the software and the hardware. And especially the form factor to see how well it interfaces with those with little or no previous media tablet experience (including me).

In the end, that's really all you can do without a predetermined set of expectations. So the following review is very much from the point of view of a tablet neophyte – somebody who is looking for an answer to the question “what's it for?” while at the same time trying to determine whether or not it succeeded in achieving that.

It's safe to say that I had a few surprises.

Chapter One - In which I try it out a bit...

The physical appearance of the Transformer Prime media tablet is in a word, “slick”.

Thin, stylish and undeniably aesthetically endowed, it feels great in the hand. Like some of its more pricey competitors, it has an alloy back to complement its oleophobic Gorilla Glass touch panel. The micro machining on the back does a great job in delivering grip while preventing it becoming a fingerprint magnet. It's also available in two colours, a subtle metallic gold (“Champagne”) or a vaguely purple silver (“Amethyst”). Neither will offend your finer sensibilities though.

For those who must know the specs, here they are...

As noted immediately above, the Transformer Prime has a companion product, the charging dock (called “The Eee Station” by Asus), to which the tablet attaches. This creates what is in effect a notebook PC, as well as providing additional battery endurance – the Eee Station battery charges the tablet's battery when docked, both batteries when plugged into the mains. Very useful.

Regrettably, the dock wasn't part of the test package for the review period, nor was I able to get a loaner prior to publication, so the Eee Station doesn't form part of this hands-on. However, NZtechfreak has confirmed that he will be in receipt of a brand new unit in the next day ot two so it will definitely be featured in Part Two. Stay tuned.

Although marginally larger in width and height, the Prime tablet is actually lighter than an iPad2 while sporting more functionality internally and possessing the 'proper' 16:9 aspect ratio screen. Yes, I believe everybody except Apple got it right. There's a speaker grill thingo on the right underside from which your collection of noises will emanate, a position that has attracted some moaning from the Interweb Bloggerati, criticism that I don't understand.

For one thing, most of us aren't devil's spawn left-hander types, so we hold the Prime in the left mitt while swiping and doing with the right. But the aforesaid blogmeisters apparently also haven't spotted that cupping the fingers of your right extremity behind the grill actually amplifies the sound while improving treble response. (And they call themselves reviewers. Psshaaawww...) Oh. and one last thing, if neither of my previous arguments impresses you as a left hander, you can simply rotate the device through 180º and *bish-bosh*... job done. That's the initial physical impressions out of the way, but if you'd like a video tour as well, NZtechfreak's effort below should be a good intro.

The Prime runs an Android OS called Ice Cream Sandwich. Asus seems to be pretty darn good at delivering updates in a timely manner, and although the Prime shipped with Honeycomb as its OS, Nztechfreak had seen to it that the newest OS was installed prior to reluctantly letting the beastie slip from his grasp. It's AndroidOS version 4, (4.0.3 it says somewhere in some settings menu item or other), and I'm already sort of familiar with it as it's also the OS running on my smartphone. So although there are some differences in execution from smartphone to tablet, much about the way the operating system and the user interface works is familiar and enabled me to find my way around the Prime quite comfortably.

Ice Cream Sandwich lock screen showing notification area bottom right,
and camera access from the unlock itself.

The lack of physical or capacitive buttons was the first notable change. If you have, say, a Samsung Galaxy device, then you will find the disappearance of the physical home button somewhat alien at first. Or as in my case, having subsequently adapted to the all-capacitive button scheme of the HTC Sensation, the missing fourth icon was slightly disorienting. But adapting further to the three onscreen buttons, while slightly odd in the beginning, quickly became second nature. In other words, fear not – you'll quickly get used to it.

So, no physical home button, and no separate capacitive icons.

The question must be asked, why the heck have Google/Android done this? Who can say... maybe to avoid future lawsuits from litigious competitors? Maybe they did some usability testing and the results showed it was better? I think a little of both but that's just my opinion and you know what folks say about opinions. The button scheme works intuitively though, so embrace and enjoy.

The lack of a physical home button also means you'll push the power button to get to the lock screen instead, although those who are accustomed to having no such physical home button will be used to that already. So go ahead, push the power button and bingo, there's your lock screen, complete with a padlock icon that you can slide to the right to unlock, or left to fire up the camera. Very useful, that quick camera access.

And while we're messing about with the lock screen, it's a good time to mention that Ice Cream Sandwich allows the notification area to grant access to emails, social media apps, txts and stuff like WiFi toggling and other quick settings while the screen is still locked, assuming your particular device supports these functions. Niiice. Except, despite this very handy capability being functional on my Sensation, sadly it doesn't work on the Prime.

Is that specific to the Asus, or is it a tablet thing? Doing a web search failed to provide any insight, so if you happen to know the answer, please let us know in the comments. It's a little disappointing though...

That said, now seems like a good time to unlock and see what else is on offer.

Chapter Two - Sinking my teeth into Ice Cream Sandwich

Like any Android device, you'll have a choice of 'Home' screens. By default, the Prime opens with the third of its five available home screens visible. That's the middle one, for those who don't visualise easily, meaning there's two screens to the left and two more to the right, each reachable via a swipe left or right. And you can populate each screen with app icons or widgets to your heart's content, or not, as you prefer.

Home screen showing icons for Back, Home and Recent apps lower left,
Notifications lower right and App Drawer top right.

Additionally, if you swipe to the left on screen five, it'll take you to the first screen, while conversely, when you swipe to the right on screen one, it'll take you to screen five, Or if you're bored, you can swipe to your heart's content in either direction and the screens will whiz past like a carousel. Very quickly and very, very smoothly.

As they should – this beast is equipped with a quad core CPU and some serious graphics power, although if that sounds like gobbledygook to you, just accept that it’s very grunty indeed. In fact, NVidia claims improvement in speed up to 3x over its predecessor, Tegra 2, while consuming ~60% less power courtesy of a fifth core. This tech completely shuts down the quad-core CPU when it isn’t required, but tasks that need significant power are switched to the quad-cores and the low power core sleeps. In addition, the integrated graphics processor makes use of 12 processing cores and is easily capable of translating compliant OpenGL games into stereoscopic 3D imagery, delivering full 3D experience to your 3D HDTV. But I digress...

A major difference between the tablet execution of ICS and the smartphone version is in the positioning of the notification area; on the phones it's at the top of the screen, while on the tablet, it's at the bottom right. It's not an issue though, as the concept is the same. Your Prime will come equipped with the stock Android notifications panel, plus the Asus “enhanced” version. It's a wash as to which to use though I prefer the Asus one. Why? It's just me I suppose.

The onscreen buttons follow Android's new UI guidelines – A Home icon, a Menu icon and a Recent Apps icon. That latter is very handy for multitasking app selection, sort of like ctrl-tab in Windows or cmd-tab on the Mac, with the focus on the app just a simple tap away. Great work Android. The Menu icon changes from system options when there is no app focus, to app-specific items when an app is front and centre. It's a very intuitive concept and is easier to use than explain, so I'll stop talking about it and just let you know that I had no problem using it without reading the manual or looking it up. And if I can do it, it'll be a doddle for you, I'm sure.

Asus notification area with its many options.

If you're possibly wondering where the App drawer icon went though, it’s now at the top right of the screen. And it pretty much does as you'd expect – shows you all the installed user apps, so you can keep all the home screens app free if you desire, devoting those spaces to truly customising your user interface with graphics and widgets and such to make your tablet look as totally unApple like as you'd surely want it to be and Apple's army of lawyers would insist it must be.

This might be an appropriate time to mention that on any home screen, you can stack apps onto each other creating a virtual folder that contains as many apps as you want, categorised in any way you feel like whether it makes sense or not. Your call. Now, that's choice in both senses of the word. The Home icon is so flipping obvious that I won't bother describing what it does. Nor will there be a test at the end of this review. OK? That's about all you need to know to become a Transformer Prime expert. Time to take a quick look at what software comes with the wee beastie.

Chapter Three - Apps, widgets and notifications

The pre-installed apps give you a real sense of what the tablet is in a conceptual sense. There's little pretence here that the Transformer Prime is a work tool. The app drawer is full of stuff for entertainment, social discourse, games and media consumption. Yes folks, this is an entertainment device first and foremost. Surprised? Didn't think so.

Harking back to my intro for a moment, this review will have meaning based on the relevance it has to the tablet's reason for being, and generally speaking, it's not difficult to compare what a device does with what it's expected to do. The problem here is that nobody seems entirely certain what that is. Various brave souls have taken a punt at what they believe it could be, might be, should be, want it to be… and they regularly fall short. Because unlike a laptop, for example, apparently nobody can agree on their reasons for wanting a tablet. Right now though, it isn’t a PC. Could it be? We’ll see when we’ve had a chance to take the dock for a test drive, but on its own, nope.

In the end, it's about what you want from it that counts, so the best we can hope for is that we read your mind and tell you how it satisfies the needs of what we think you want. Or we can compare it to other tablets perhaps, and measure speed of the CPU, GPU, SDD, WiFi, GPS, USB and other even more obscure criteria.

And we'll do that in Part Two. Or rather I will, because I'm doing the review. But it won't demonstrate how velvety smooth the scrolling is, or how stunningly saturated the colours are, or how responsive pinch is, or all those other things that make the experience pleasurable and define in the user's mind how much one experience is superior to another.

Only you can make that decision. All I can do is tell you that in those areas, this is the best tablet I've reviewed. Outside of having some limited experience with other tablets (cough, iPad, cough), it's also, as I pointed out earlier, the only tablet I've actually reviewed, so take that with whatever caveats you feel appropriate and let's continue.

The operating system, as earlier described, is probably the finest mobile OS existing today. It has a utility that its competitors fail to equal. It's more flexible by far and infinitely more customisable. And it's “prettier” out of the box than the opposition. Or way “uglier” if you want it to be. And it feels faster. In the version as installed on the Asus Transformer Prime, Android’s tablet OS is a delight to use.

Just today, Asus notified through its OTA programme that there was a new firmware available, and it installed without a hitch. See that Samsung? HTC? Motorola? It's possible to not only get a decent ICS installation out within days of it being released, it's also possible to listen to your customers and get incremental bug-fix releases out even quicker.

So, a nice operating system, with timely upgrades and maintenance releases. Excellent beginning.

The stock browser seems to meet most of the criteria you'd expect on this class of device. There are no unexpected deviations from the features and processes we've been accustomed to, so overall the experience has been agreeable. But there is something that needs to be said and it seems to be OS related rather than browser specific. The left side of the web page is clipped such that some information is lost on that side of each web page. For some pages that's not an issue, for others it is. Suffice to say it's worse in the stock browser, though the same behaviour, albeit to a lesser extent, is exhibited within Opera, so it's deeper than browser level.

Opera browser, clipping evident at left. Yuck.

Stock browser, even worse clipping visible. Poo!

The email app works as well as one would need, with the necessary utility and ease of setup we've learned to expect in Android. The Android Market app loads and displays quickly, and once you've used it, it needs no further instruction. YouTube app is also exactly what you'd expect and video performance is flawless. The included Sound app seems to deliver all you need out of the box with decent quality, totally acceptable volume and even a rudimentary EQ to sculpt the sound to suit your choice of headphones or ear buds.

There's an included app called Android Social which enables you to FaceBook to your heart's desire, the obligatory Gmail app for, well, Gmail connection, TweetCaster for... um, tweeting, QuickPic for organising and uploading your favourite pics, and other self explanatory apps including MyNet, MyCloud, MyLibrary and FileManager. So you won't be wanting for much in the way of basic apps. Of course, you can replace any or all of these apps with more fully-featured or even smaller equivalents from the Android Market, so if the desire takes you, fill your boots.

NZtechfreak will advise you to supplement the stock video playback capability with his recommended alternative app, Dice Player, which handles practically any codec you could throw at it with aplomb. There's a free, ad-supported version of the app available on the Android Market, so make it your first stop if you're intending to use your Prime as the video viewer of choice, either on the device's own beautiful display or to your telly via HDMI cable connection.

There are other apps pre-installed including PolarisOffice, a supposedly MS Office compatible suite that lets you do Word, Excel and Powerpoint type productivity work at a pinch, although how easy that would be without a physical keyboard, physical number pad and mouse is open to debate. However, the foregoing should offer confirmation that you'll be able to use the tablet out of the box to do all the things that most people would presumably want to with such a device.

The market should deliver any functionality that you find missing or inadequate, including the ubiquitous Google Maps with Navigation, alternative synthetic voices for text to speech, chat programmes, book apps and readers, anything you could feasibly need to get the most out of the Transformer Prime.

Chapter Four - Putting hardware under the microscope

The Asus Transformer Prime is the first quad core media tablet to market and as you'd expect from that specification, it delivers a level of performance that is quite frankly awesome. Responsive is simply understating its abilities. It's a delight to use and very satisfying to show to others who haven't seen it in action. NZtechfreak has provided an insight into the video performance of the Prime, as seen below, and there's no doubt that you'll be impressed by its capability. If you haven't checked it out, now's the time.

How does it compare to an iPad2? It feels faster, as you'd expect, but not jaw-droppingly so. The main point of comparison, hardware wise, is that none of your Apple-totin' mates will be able to credibly claim that the user experience in responsiveness and fluidity is better on their choice of tablet. Lag? I've heard of it, but it's absent on this device. So is that Ice Cream Sandwich? The hardware?... Probably a little of both. The result is an experience that won't disappoint.

The screen is beautiful. I can't think of any other way to describe it.

The shot below shows how the Prime compares with the Sensation, itself not a slug in terms of video panel output. Both screens are set to 40% brightness and shot in a brightly sunlit space to compare output. As you can see, the Prime outshines its companion in readability but it's interesting to note that Asus has built in an additional IPS “outdoor” mode, not used here, that gives the brightness and contrast a boost to make viewing in direct sunlight a possibility.

Both screens at 40% brightness, the difference in whites is apparent.
Although shot doesn't do justice to either display.

There's no doubt that it works, but direct sunlight at 1pm in Summer will be a struggle regardless of such enhancement, so try before you buy. As a point of interest, although a SAMOLED display will doubtless deliver a discernible improvement in legibility over the IPS panel in extreme lighting conditions, there's very little in it under the conditions you're most likely to encounter in regular use. And the high resolution of the screen makes the choice even harder. Asus have delivered a great display here.

Battery performance while the testing was in its video, gaming, websurfing and music stages was never gob-smackingly great. It was never awful either. Given what it was being asked to do, I can't fault it. Suffice to say that the manufacturer's numbers are spot on or so close as makes no difference. Without having the dock to test yet, I can't comment on whether that accessory fulfills its promise, but we’ll have the answer to that in Part Two.

Battery consumption while idling is practically zero.
Finally went on charge after five days. Amazing...

The screen grab at left shows a typical couple of days worth of battery use now that the Prime is being used primarily by me and the intensive testing period is over. You can see that it's going to deliver significant endurance between charges if your usage is anything like mine. Since I did that grab, the battery continued to power the Prime to a little over five days before going completely flat. That really is something.

However, as always, your mileage will vary. The result above indicates that my tablet use is light, likely because I have a desktop Mac, laptop and an Android phone to share the load. Which may be rather atypical tablet user behaviour, or it may not. I can say though that you’ll see much better battery endurance with the Prime, if you’re currently using the first generation iPad.

While the Prime doesn't have a 3G data capability, and is unlikely to ever have such, it does WiFi very well indeed. Up to the standard of the Sensation as shown in the screen grabs above, with both devices side by side and two walls plus 40 feet distant from my gutless wireless router. Even doing the “bathroom” test, four walls and 50 feet distant, the Prime retained its signal while the Sensation intermittently dropped its connection. With a better router than mine, the Prime will be bulletproof.

Prime WiFi at -66dBm

Sensation WiFi at -66 dBm

This may come as as something of a shock considering there’s been significant criticism of Asus over their alleged substandard Prime WiFi performance. I’m confirming that the unit tested doesn’t suffer from WiFi outages or poor signal strength. Maybe the hardware is now better. Maybe the firmware updates have fixed whatever issue people were experiencing. Don’t know, and don’t care. The screen grab above shows that WiFi is absolutely fine.

So there's no doubt that the hardware is more than capable of delivering the experience that the specifications suggest. Right? Well, that depends... I take it for granted that each generation of hardware delivers better performance than the previous generation, and usually that's true. But there's an issue with the camera on the Prime that needs to be addressed. In my opinion, the camera Asus has chosen to equip the Prime with is rather 'ordinary'. I've tested this many times and the results are always the same – even on the lowest ISO setting (ISO100), the noise level when shooting in bright daylight is extremely high.

The images below show the comparison between the Sensation (top) and the Prime (bottom) of the same venue on the same day, wide and in Photoshop closeup. The difference, I'm sure you'll agree, is obvious, even though the Sensation's camera has the same 8MPx count in its sensor. 

So why the striking difference in the dynamic range, and the noise? If this is down to the software or firmware, then perhaps there's an opportunity for improvement. Right now though, the Prime's still camera results are poor relative to the standard you'd expect from a decent smartphone.

Of course, the portability aspect of a modern smartphone has made the inbuilt camera a must-have feature, to the extent that consumers are abandoning point and shoot standalone cameras in droves. OEMs are now expected to deliver a high standard of image capture from their smartphones. A tablet camera, on the other hand, is only required to bang off the occasional candid snap so it stands to reason that it won't be a priority feature. So, while the Prime's camera is adequate, and in line with its competition in still image quality, don't expect great results.

As far as playback of recorded video on the device's video panel and via HDMI to HD television, it's difficult to tell the difference in quality between the Sensation's efforts and the Prime's – there's significant colour variation between the two, and the Sensation's blacks are more saturated, but there's a case to be made that they are in fact too black and shadow detail is lost as a result. Neither camera should be contemplated for broadcast video of course but either would be considered entirely adequate for home use, probably enough to render your handycam to the inorganic rubbish collection.

The GPS in the Prime has attracted a lot of criticism, so much so that Asus has taken to deleting the GPS from the tablet's specification sheets entirely. And no wonder – it's startlingly bad. Testing it against the Sensation's implementation shows that in a situation where both devices were side by side in marginal signal areas, the Sensation achieved rapid lock with multiple satellites available while the Prime showed no signal whatsoever. Absolutely none. 

Below is the Sensation's GPS performance, indoors on the left, outside in the middle and right.

Even when putting the Prime in the most signal-friendly position possible, the signal was always too low for GPS lock. And this after flashing the recent GPS “fix” update supplied OTA by Asus to address the issue. It's hard to find words to describe such a poor result without resorting to expletives.

The Prime struggles to obtain any kind of lock, mostly losing it
immediately following capture should you succeed.

The screen shots here should illustrate the nature of the GPS issue. If GPS is important to you, as it is for me, this tablet is probably not for you. The GPS is utterly worthless and may come back to haunt Asus before long. Extremely disappointing for a device with such potential. I'm looking forward to see what the developer community can do to resolve this but won't be holding my breath.

Chapter Five – Initial conclusions

The prologue which kicked this review off explored the conundrum of what the tablet is actually for and I'd answer that this way, after having used it and listened to the feedback of those I've encouraged to tinker with it...

It's a portable device that many will never actually take out of their house, that they'll use to check out Facebook, surf the web, check an email, visit YouTube, read a book, watch an occasional movie and play games. Or snap a still picture or two at the bbq, record a little video of the backyard footie and maybe even listen to a track or two from Houses of the Holy. Perhaps even plot a route down the West Coast for that adventure holiday they've been contemplating.

That's it basically. Nobody, not even my better half who madly desires the iPad, seriously thinks they'll use it for work. Not that it couldn't be used for work – if you really had to, mind you – just that it's not optimised for that role. Nor were doing video editing or creating music seriously considered, even though those things are indeed possible. And everybody seems to have a different priority for their tablet or tablet-to-be.

As part of my testing, I surrendered to the impulse to indulge in a little retro gaming, courtesy of ScummVM and two of my LucasArts classic RPA adventures, “Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle” and the brilliant “Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge”. What a hoot! The bad gags, mind-bending puzzles, cheesy midi music and the wonderful Scumm interface played on the Prime was better than I remember them on the i486 PCs they were designed for all those decades ago.

Day of the Tentacle for PC on Android... Transformer Prime brings the
game back to life through the magic of ScummVM.

That little diversion into the past also showed how effortlessly the Prime delivered the virtualisation needed to make the experience as grin-generating as it was. That was in itself almost tempting enough for me to contemplate buying a Prime and to dig out all my old Sierra and LucasArts titles for some serious reliving of my geeky youth.

Almost… $800 is not chump change, the legendary Leisure Suit Larry notwithstanding.

So, it’s simply a sleek content consumption device, that you have on your lap while watching TV, or prop up on the duvet while reading an e-zine or e-book in bed. Or use to wind down with a 3D FPS game before you head out or maybe hit the hay. So, then, how does the Asus Transformer Prime measure up against those criteria?

In some things it is actually much better than I'd have thought, compared to a smartphone for example. Video watching was always good, no matter whether the video was YouTube, ripped movies, games or the home recorded variety (no, not that kind of home recorded). Five stars.

Audio playback of any file format including streamed internet radio was faultless. Five stars.

Reading e-books was an absolute pleasure in every case except bright sunlight. Four stars.

Game playing using the on-screen controls, although not something I indulge in frequently, was nearly PC quality. Four stars.

Web surfing was flawed by the clipping mentioned earlier so... Three stars there.

Still photography was hampered by a substandard camera/image processing issue. Three stars.

Video recording was entirely acceptable, made easier by that superb screen. Four stars.

Social media including FB and email were handled with panache so what can I say? Five stars.

Battery life was every bit as good as I'd read, though the dock would boost the score. Four stars.

The user experience, on the whole? That's the $64,000 question. In some ways this device is a watershed in its user-friendliness, its fluidity and its responsiveness thanks to Ice Cream Sandwich and the hardware. Those attributes discussed earlier that make it such a pleasure to use are in the main outstanding, the whole only let down by some incomprehensible compromises in areas where a significant proportion of the target market would expect better.

Overall, the score is Four Stars, which is a mighty good result I'd say.

The keen-eyed reader will have noticed that connectivity is missing from the score chart above. We're going to be looking at that facet of the real user review in depth in Part Two. In a very real sense, connectivity thwarts a straightforward scoring system. All else being equal, a device like the Transformer Prime can readily justify a higher score than one that doesn't have a dock, for example, but that means that any tablet without a dock will automatically be disadvantaged. Is that fair, I wonder?

So Part Two will address that and we'll introduce what we believe to be the fairest method of scoring going forward. It will likely be a tablet-only thing simply because it has huge ramifications for the tablet's utility, and as the tablet creeps ever closer to the notebook, the line will be very blurry indeed.

Epilog

If your media consumption needs are similar to those described in the review, you’re likely to get a great deal of pleasure from the Asus Transformer Prime. Its audio, video and games performance are topnotch, its form factor and build quality excellent, its user experience without equal. There are already thousands of tablet-optimised applications available on the Android Market and the other app stores so the user experience, good as it already is, will only improve with each passing day. Can I recommend it? Heck yes, what’s not to recommend – if your wants or needs match the talents of this beautiful piece of tech gadgetry.

On the other hand, the caveats previously examined will undeniably put a proportion of the potential market off though, and while unfortunate, that’s the nature of “real user” reviews. At AndroidNZ, we tell it as it is because we believe our readership deserves the most frank, impartial appraisal we can give. It’s a fine, but flawed, device that could easily have been outstanding and the best tablet on the market bar none. It fell a little short of that lofty ambition, in my appraisal.

So, where are the performance figures? In a sense, they're already in the result above, because the numbers, although good for comparisons and urinating contests, are also somewhat academic where user expectations and user experience are concerned. Are you delighted with the responsiveness and the fluidity, or not? Does that screen look stunning to you or not? Is that music track you're listening to as immersive as you'd hoped or is it not? Those are the real performance results in the quite literal sense of the word 'performance'.

But fear not...

In Part Two of this actual user review, we'll be looking at how the Prime fares based on our suite of benchmark tests, with some comparison figures to give you things to ponder over and suffer angst about, or perhaps even to convince you to drop some cash on this amazingly competent media tablet.

And we're going to examine the connectivity conundrum to offer a meaningful rating that works for you, the potential purchaser. More work for us, but ultimately a fairer result for everyone.

I hope you'll join us here at AndroidNZ in a few days for the conclusion.

See you then.