Today's unboxing is going to be a tablet accessory, but uh probably the most
compelling tablet accessory that has yet to exist. So, no, I'm not talking about,
you know, cute little carrying cases or jewel encrusted well carrying cases or I
mean really that seems to be what most tablet accessories are these days is
carrying cases. But no, this is the
Transformer Prime. Well, E-PAD Transformer Prime keyboard dock
attachment. And uh this is the black or gray or whatever they want to call it.
It's that color. It's not the other color. So, that goes with the
Transformer Prime that I have here. So, you can see there's a couple of logos on
here. We got HDMI powered by NVIDIA Tegra. Tegra 3, mind you. Um although
that's not in the keyboard attachment itself. So, what is the keyboard
attachment itself? Well, it does a few things. One, it's a keyboard. Okay, so
that part is fairly self-explanatory. There's the keyboard aspect of it. Uh
two, it is like uh remember those old uh
docking stations that you used to get for old notebooks that had like
additional expansion? Like they'd have a parallel port for your printer and stuff
like that? Well, this is kind of like that as well because it has additional
I/IO including actually uh you know what, we'll go through the additional IO
later. And then last but not least, it also has an additional supplementary
battery. So, okay, what ASUS has to say is dock and charge the pad for up to 18
hours of battery life. That seems a little optimistic, especially based on what I've seen so far. But what it does
do is once you plug it into your Transformer Prime, it does charge the
Prime's battery off of the battery that is on the keyboard dock itself, which is
very, very cool. So, we get a touchpad, we get a keyboard, we get some
additional IO, and we get additional battery life. How can you go wrong?
Well, there's one way to go wrong. No, unfortunately, your old keyboard dock is
not compatible with the new Transformer
and your new Transformer keyboard dock is not trans. I
wonder is this going to work?
Hm. No. Okay. So, your new keyboard dock
is not compatible with the old ASUS Transformer. So, why don't we have a
closer look at it? So, you're going to see it's got a great finish to it. I
mean, the Transformer Prime is just leagues ahead of the original
Transformer in terms of the overall build quality. Check out the brushed metal finish here. Uh, let's have a look
at the keyboard layout itself, actually. So, we've got correctly positioned shift
keys, correctly positioned enter, long backspace. Overall, no complaints. It's
a chicklet style keyboard. Very short travel distances on these keys, but that
is to be expected because the last thing you want is high-profile keys that are
going to stand a chance of scratching your keypad or uh scratching your screen
when you have the thing closed. The hinge looks like it's very high quality.
You can see it's quite difficult for me to move it right now, but once the uh
the transformer primes on there, giving me additional leverage, it should be fine. Very solid metal construction,
though. Um, so every part of the hinge should be very, very robust. There's the
lock button. So, uh Oh, yeah. I'm guessing that moves once I actually plug
something into it. And you can see the Transformer Prime's ASUS's proprietary
docking connector right down there. You've also got a number of hotkeys. So,
instead of F keys, uh, we've replaced all of those with just pure hotkeys. So,
you don't actually have to hold down a function key in order to make it happen. So, we've got, you know, your wireless,
Bluetooth, brightness up, brightness down, auto brightness. Uh, is that
really the internet button? Cuz that looks an awful lot like an Internet Explorer thing, but I'm sure they'd
prefer you use Chrome. Um, full certy keyboard and touchpad, easy file sharing
with built-in ah SD cards and USB. So, I want to show you guys the improved IO.
So, what do we got here? This is a U
Okay, whatever it's labeled. That's a USB port. Right over here is a
full-sized SD card slot. On the other side, we
have Oh, okay. Right. So, that replaces
the dock connector on the bottom of the Transformer Prime when it's plugged into
the uh to the base station. So, that's how you'll charge both the keyboard dock
as well as the Transformer Prime once they're connected together. I want you
guys to check out the bottom. I've put a couple fingerprints on it already, but you know how it is. So, there's your
brush metal finish even on the bottom of the device. So ASUS has really taken a
page out of Apple's book when it comes to finishing every aspect of the device
in as beautiful a way as possible rather than sort of what I would consider to be
more like the traditional PC approach, which is to take the underside of things
like a notebook and um and not really worry too much about them. So I'm just
taking out these rubber inserts and I'm going to go ahead and plug the
Transformer Prime into the docking station. So, with the actual
intended tablet, this should be far less difficult than it was when I was trying
to do it with the wrong one. So, you just got to make sure you have it lined up right. There it goes. It locks into
place. And then all you got to do is boot this bad boy up and it should be
detected in a pretty Yep, there we go. Docking connected. Use You got to be
kidding me. There's the instructions. Use keyboard to type words. Thank you
Google and ASUS for that. So, I just
wanted to show you guys what the profile of the device is like. You know what? Actually, give me a sec. I'll be right
back. So, it occurs to me. I want to show you guys the profile of the device
compared to the older ASUS Transformer, which is right here. So, you can see
that even with the keyboard dock, the new Transformer isn't that much thicker
than the old Transformer, which is very, very cool. ASUS has done a fantastic job
with the Transformer Prime. Now you compare it to something like this is a
first generation Acer Aspire 1. Look how thin it is compared to a netbook. This
netbook with the battery it has which is not a six cell battery is only capable
of about 2 hours of battery life whereas the Transformer Prime is capable of well
over 14 hours of battery life once you include the extra keyboard dock. The
last thing I want to compare it to in terms of its size once you put the
keyboard on is the iPad 2. Just because it's kind of the de facto standard for
tablet comparisons, I want to make sure that I have it in there so you guys have
a clear idea. Oh, it's even more broken than it was before. Oh, what a bummer.
That's that uh crack keeps spreading. I might have to uh might have to get that
glass replaced. So, there is the profile compared to the iPad 2. So, here we go.
Transformer 1, iPad 2, Transformer Prime
with Tegra 3, and the additional keyboard dock. Thank you for checking
out my unboxing and first look at the keyboard dock and this beautiful little
piece of machinery from ASUS. Don't
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