ASUS Transformer Prime: meet the tablet that will replace your laptop
Dan Seitz Tablets are great as a form factor: they fit more easily in your briefcase, they’re lighter, they’re quicker to boot, and they take up less room in Starbucks. Also you look futuristic when you carry one. But they’re not exactly laptop replacements. Until now.
Meet the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime. You might remember Asus as the guys who helped pioneer the netbook; 7″ laptops that were much more portable and easier to use. They put a tablet on the market called the Transformer a year ago, because it could be slotted into a keyboard dock and turned into a laptop, and it was a good tablet. The Transformer Prime, however, is amazing.
Let’s start with what’s under the hood: it’s technically a supercomputer. It has a quad-core chip, the Tegra 3, that is probably better than your laptop, and it’s backed by a 10.1″ Super IPS display viewable from 187 degrees, and also some brightening technology. In theory, this tablet could grind through your typical console game with no problem.
You’re probably wondering how terrible the battery is, since that’s the obvious trade-off for blazing speed and a bright screen. It runs a measly…twelve hours. Yeah, Asus took that whole “tablet battery life” thing to heart.
Even better, it’s thin, a third of an inch thin, light, weighing less than one and a half pounds, and pretty. The original Transformer was a plastic block. This one is a polished aluminium mirror. It’s even got a micro HDMI port.
You might be wondering what the price is, and for the tablet itself, it’s fairly reasonable: $500 for 32GB of memory and $600 for 64GB of memory. The keyboard dock, though, which turns this into a laptop, will run you $150, so you’re looking at $650 minimum if you want to replace your laptop. But, hey, to get that much speed in your briefcase might just be worth it.
Meet The Asus Transformer Prime, the First Supercomputer Tablet [Gizmodo]
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