Interested in a Android tablet? You might want to hold out a little. December cannot get here soon enough – the tablet world is about to be shaken up with some real processing power. You know that powerful quad core processor you might have in your PC? Well expect it in your tablet soon enough.
While sporting a quad core processor, the Asus Transformer Prime will a have thinner and lighter chassis than the iPad 2, while also using aluminium for the casing. See Samsung? It can be done.
Asus’s new Transformer Prime will now sport a Nvidia Tegra 3 chip which actually has 5 CPU cores and 12 GPU cores. Now that 5th core is the interesting one – it is a special low voltage core which is only used when the device is idle. During that time the 4 bigger cores are switched off, so you can expect great battery life. In terms of memory you are looking at 1GB, which is pretty run of the mill for Android Tablets now. There is also a 8 megapixel rear camera and a 1.2 megapixel front camera. But that rear camera will have a iPhone 4s-matching f2.4 aperture lens. The 10.1 inch screen should be decent as well. Using an IPS panel, viewing angles should be great with the 1280×800 resolution.
Asus says it will run Honeycomb 3.2 but will also be upgradable to Ice Cream Sandwich. Specs and connectivity is pretty great – a MicroSD slot, Micro-HDMI can also be found. But the big news is with the optional keyboard and trackpad accessory that also contains an additional battery for up to 18 hours of unplugged productivity. You simply clip the Eee Pad Transformer Prime into it, and the tablet is changed into a very thin laptop. That dock also carries an additional USB port and SD card slot.
Best of all, the pricing seems to be good as well. At $500 for the 32GB model and $600 for the 64GB model, and a more powerful and thinner design, it might be the first Android tablet to give the iPad 2 a run for its money. We cannot wait to get our hands on this one…
If you want a more thorough explanation of the Nvidia Tegra 3, the folks at ZADroid did a great write-up.
(See our review of the iPad 2 here)
