welcome to a very exciting unboxing and first look this is the EAD Transformer
Prime and based on everything that I already know about this tablet I am
extremely excited to have a look at it so I've got a few other tablets here for
me with me for comparison so I've got
the uh ASUS Sam the ASUS Sams the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10. one I've got the
ASUS transformer original and then I've also got uh an iPad 2 in its little snug
case there which I'll take off for a closer comparison check this out so the first thing I notice about the box is a
nice foamy insert which is going to make sure that that screen doesn't get
damaged in any way during Transit very very high hopes for this tablet so let's
check out the packaging here rumble's going to help us so the first thing we
find here are some of the outstanding benefits offered cool so incredibly slim
yes this is the slimmest tablet yet Ultra performance with the NVIDIA Tegra
3 quad core and that's a bit of a misnomer cuz it actually has five cores
one of which is a low powerered core for when the tablet is not really doing much
silky smooth 3D gaming HD video playing up to 1080p all on Google's user
friendly and upgradeable Android OS it's funny they mention upgradable because it
will be compatible with Ice Cream Sandwich moving forward although it does
come with honeycomb unrivaled visual Acuity so this super IPS Plus panel
actually is according to what I've heard so far even better than what was my
previous favorite tablet panel which was the one the uh the PLS panel on the
Galaxy Tab 10.1 so I'm very excited to check that out Supreme sound so ASUS
says they've put in uh improved audio
performance okay unlimited productivity with the uh yeah with the dock which
I'll be checking out later so there's the Transformer Prime doc just like the
original Transformer you can add more battery life as well as
a full quty keypad and some additional IO so that's pretty cool hey check this
out this doesn't come with like a a Cheesy microfiber cloth it comes with an
actual proper textured one that's going to like look at this I actually bought
one like this number of years back this looks
like almost exactly the same as the one I bought way back
when whatever it's very similar this is really really old and ratty and this
one's new so you can clean off your tablet with that it also comes with what
appears to be the same charger that comes with the original Transformer so
actually here I have it on hand so we might as well check it out what do we
got here h y Jus something or other Yep
looks like the same thing and as you can see it's a potent cat toy which you
shouldn't be playing with that all right
what else we got for accessories I think that's pretty much it so it's a fairly
bare package you got your cleaning cloth you got your little instructional doodad
you got your charger and and you've got
what is obviously the most important piece the actual e-pad Transformer Prime
so let's check this out first thing we want to do is take off this plastic
shoing so this already looks very familiar to me this looks a lot like the
Zenbook which is just a beautiful piece
of computer hardware so I love the finish here it's got kind of a
concentric circle thing going on with
like a brushed Metal finish nice shiny ASUS logo right in the middle
there overall the machine is quite light compared to the original Transformer
that was one of the things that made me sort of less of a fan of the Transformer
because in spite of the of the good form factor it really had some heft to it
this one is definitely significantly lighter that's also one of the things
that I don't like that much about the iPad 2 it's a very very heavy device and
for a tablet it becomes very relevant if you're going to be yeah it's actually
quite light I don't think it's as light as the Galaxy Tab 10 well maybe hold on
wow this is really light even in spite of the fact that it has feels a little
heavier I'll have to weigh them when I do my proper follow-up on this on my ncixcom channel but uh yeah it feels
quite quite light indeed very nice F
Factor but yeah okay sorry what I was saying so yeah when you're like you know
laying in bed watching a movie or reading a book or whatever the weight becomes very very important so what else
we got on the back here we have a flash and the 8 megapixel camera and then
we've got one speaker on the Transformer Prime this feels like a bit of a step
backwards to me given that the original Transformer had two speakers one on the
right hand side and one on the left hand side on the edges there but you know
what it doesn't bother me that much when I'm using the iPad 2 which only has one
speaker as well so I guess I'll let it slide this time let's have a look at
what we've got for iio on the device itself there's your standard headphone
jack up at the top we find a whole lot of nothing except a microphone we've got
our onoff standby button our rocker
switch for volume that that looks hold
on is that uh that looks like micro HDMI
but I could be wrong give me a sec I'll double check that for you guys and then
oh that could be a microphone as well interesting okay I don't know what that
is either but this is definitely a Micro SD slot which is awesome because that in
my mind already makes the Transformer Prime aside from the price point because
yes the Transformer Prime is more expensive than the original Transformer
but instead of starting at a 16 gig model at$ 3.99 it starts at a 32 gig
model at $4.99 which is fine because the Transformer when it launched was $4.99
for the 32 gig model anyway so now we see a 32 gig model and a 64 instead of a
16 and a 32 so let's actually turn this baby on oh yeah the dock down here at
the bottom sorry I wasn't quite done yet oh what are
these oh you know what these are probably for uh yeah these are for
docking to the uh the keyboard the keyboard which actually acts not only as
a keyboard but an extended battery I think I already mentioned that so there's our serial number here's a
little plastic thingy we don't have to leave that on we can get rid of that if we want I would probably not keep that
on the device so it's booting up right now so let's talk a little bit about the
Tegra 3 processor oh yeah we've got our front webcam here as well or our front
camera so Tegra 3 processor so it's a
quad core CPU plus NVIDIA has also
significantly upgraded the GPU so it is substantially more powerful than the
Tegra 2 which was pretty much the only
uh processor that you found in most of the first generation tablets with
Android uh honeycomb um right so I mentioned that
it's quad core but there's a fifth core so your four cores are going to turn on
or turn off or be clocked higher or clocked lower depending on the profiles
you set depending on the load that you're running and then there's an additional One Core that can run just as
a super low power State and the all the other four ones are off so that's why
it's actually a 5 Core processor NVIDIA has also significantly upgraded the GPU
horsepower so CPU is better and more faster and there are more and the GPU is
much more powerful so okay one thing that I've noticed
right away about this guy hold on I'm just going to key in the password to my
uh my SS ID
here okay there we go one thing I've noticed
about it right away is I don't know if you can see this in this light but I can
see the touchscreen interface a little bit I can see uh the grid of dots it's
not that noticeable it only really you know what it only really comes out if I
catch the Light that's up there on the ceiling and it shines directly off the
tablet into my eyes I can kind of see the dots around it but it's definitely
not as noticeable as something like the Motorola Zoom or the um tashiba Thrive
both of those had very very noticeable touch screen overlays so this is sort of
what I would say is about middle of the road in terms of the visibility of it I
I can see it a little bit so let's just skip that let's get this booted up I
just want to check out the overall responsiveness of the unit so one of the
things that I've really heard said about the Transformer Prime is that all of the
kind of nonsense slowness that's been
associated with Android tablets is pretty much gone because here I mean
come on let's compare it to something like an iPad 2 where the user interface
is so slick I mean look at that it just kind of seamlessly goes from okay the
air video one is at the bottom left oh boom now it's at the bottom right how
did that happen whoa holy cow um so it's a very very smooth user interface
experience and that's something that my expectation is that yes throwing more
CPU and GPU horsepower at the problem is a good way to address it and it
definitely looks better I mean look at this you can see how quickly and how
smoothly it transitions now but ice cream sandwich is also supposed to
address that in a very very big way as well so when you compare that to the
Transformer see you see that leg you see
that the first generation uh the first
generation Android tablets really didn't feel uh I mean I'd say the Galaxy Tab
10.1 was probably the slickest feeling out of all of them but they didn't
really quite have that same feel as the Apple device and it looks like it was a
combination of hardware and software so now we finally got the hardware that's
going to be a lot more competitive with the processor and the iPad 2 we've got a
screen that looks very very vibrant and let's actually go ahead
and wow look at that so they've really increased the brightness of the screen
compared to the Transformer looks like a very very
similar but slightly different uh sort of take on the desktop wallpaper that we
were using on the original one yeah so brightness is way up hard to evaluate
color just based on sort of my initial Impressions here they have made some
significant changes to the menu right here though so we've got a bunch of
different stuff including your eco mode so turning on power saving mode turning
on balance mode turning on normal speed mode you can lock your orientation or
not lock your orientation look how quickly the response is on this though
compared to previous Android tablets where navigating through menus really
feels like a bit of a chore Wi-Fi on Wi-Fi off let's see how quickly it
connect to my can connect to my Wi-Fi is my browser working
yet that's nice that's one of the things that I really like about the iPad 2o is
that when you are in range of your wireless it's like boom it's on it's on
so let's go nci.com
see how quickly that loads up I'm sitting right next to my Hotpot so this
should be pretty much a best case scenario I'm on a Broadband 50 so that's a 50 megabit per second internet
plan go to The Forum let's read the
forums very very nice to look at overall though I mean look at the okay I I
apologize because you guys aren't really going to be able to see this but the
contrast between this black and this white is just outstanding like this
looks like the deepest of deep blacks it almost looks like part of the frame more
than it looks like part of the screen that is just
amazing so far I'm very impressed with the screen
though scrolling is nice and quick let's see zooming cuz that's one of the things
that I really felt was totally not the best experience with the
uh the first generation of Android tablets so oh there's no internet
connection let's get that address okay just a sec I'll be back guys
okay so here's the Transformer I've got the same page loaded so zooming in
actually feels a little bit better than it used to there was a recent system update I wonder if that kind of
addressed some of my concerns but it's still not quite there
with something like the iPad 2 which just feels so silky smooth when you're
zooming around I mean look at that okay so we're not quite there but that's more
like a software thing that hopefully will be addressed with Ice Cream Sandwich uh let's wrap this up with just
like a general physical comparison I just love this thing physically actually
like I love it physically no no I don't do that I mean it's a machine it's just
it's taboo still you know give it another couple hundred years and maybe
we'll be having a different conversation so let's look at the uh let's look at
the overall format compared to the iPad 2 so I'm just going to lay this down on
top of it so the iPad 2 is still not a
16 by10 screen which is horrible and
needs to just die in a fire um hopefully that's something Apple will address with
their next tablet so you can see we do have a significantly more widescreen
screen which is great for watching your media content whether it's on YouTube or
whether it's over Network or you put your media files on here on a Micro SD
which iPad 2 doesn't have uh very frustrating cuz I do like the iPad oh
let's talk about the glass right Gorilla Glass so uh as some of you know I
recently broke my iPad too so my screen is cracked all the way from here to here
and then all the way from here over to here it's pretty pretty wrecked which uh
has made me fairly unhappy so so this uses Corning Weare Gilla glass which
should make it about as scratch proof and break proof and everything proof as
possible so that's uh that's something to bear in mind guys that actually
there's a great demo that ASUS has on YouTube of the original Transformer
where they take keys and objects and try to scratch the glass and they show you
the result at the end so that's that's outstanding and that's something if
you've ever had a tablet that's broken then hey it might be a factor for you so
let's have a look at the format compared to the original trans Transformer which
is pretty darn similar look at that they've reduced the width a little bit
which is really nice although it is a little bit more okay so let's call this
the why don't we call this the length so it's a little bit shorter lengthwise but
it's a little bit uh wider okay however the screen size is pretty much the same
so what they've done is they've lost some of this bezel space around here and
then they've increased a little bit of the bezel space around the top let's
check out the thickness so thickness was one of the ones one of the things where
the original trans forer really didn't
stack up well against its comp so yeah the original Transformer really didn't
stack up that well thickness wise you can see compared to the iPad 2 against
the original Transformer and then the there's a Transformer Prime against the
original Transformer so I'm going to go ahead and put the iPad 2 next to the
Transformer Prime so you can see the thick oh that's really really close Okay
so ASUS says it's the thinnest I guess I'll have to take their word for it but
these all look really really close to me so here's the iPad 2 Transformer Prime
and Galaxy Tab 10 .1 uh so yes this was
HDMI over here so that's micro HDMI so
what ASUS has done here is they've rece they've produced AA a tablet that this
was my favorite Android uh Tegra 2 tablet the Galaxy Tab 10.1 no secret I
love the screen love the form factor love the
weight however no micro SD no HDMI
output done like you lose the the
benefit of going with the Google platform in my in my personal opinion by
removing those features because that's a huge selling point for me versus
something like an iPad 2 where you have to have like a weird dongle to do HDMI
output or get a USB port or whatever the case may be so the Transformer Prime
takes that form factor fits in a micro HDMI fits in a Micro SD slot and is
still very very lightweight great looking screen so far but I'm going to
spend some more time with it hopefully in the next little bit great piece of
glass and I think we've pretty much got a winner here folks so thanks for
checking out my unboxing and first look at the Transformer Prime don't forget to
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