The Transformer Prime 'Real-user' Review: Part 2 - "A tale of two concepts..."

Transformer Prime and dock, flash drive inserted in dock's USB port.

The Asus Transformer Prime is probably, as I write this, the quintessential Android media tablet. Besides the fact that it appears to be the only Android tablet running Ice Cream Sandwich that the public can actually get their hands on, it also has a hardware specification basically unequalled in Androidville, or anyplace else for that matter. Yet the Prime's dock most certainly adds another dimension entirely.

In Part One of this review, we explored the concept of the media tablet. Or perhaps, more accurately, we explored the difficulty in defining the role of the tablet. In this second part, we'll see that it's even more of an enigma than we might have expected, especially given the rapid evolution the category is undergoing.

At the conclusion of this review, we'll come back to this point and hopefully make some sense of the ever-morphing beast, but as a starting point it's helpful to recognise that there's the iPad - and there's the tablet - and they're not the same thing at all.