Introduction
The ASUS Transformer Prime is a tablet that many have yearned after. The first Transformer was last year's most popular Android tablet, an impressive feat in a pretty competitive and high-stakes market. Our Hardware.Info readers voted the Transformer the best tablet of 2011. Previews of the new tablet have been extremely popular as well among our readers. When ASUS announced that the bootloader would be locked and that there would be no GPS, the worldwide response indicated just how important ASUS is on the tablet market. We'll address these two features later on in this article.
The popularity of the original ASUS Eee Pad Transformer is largely due to the dock that you can buy separately. However, we're not going to claim that the dock is the only reason to buy the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer over other Tegra 2 Android tablets. ASUS really paid attention to the interface and delivered a very complete product. The Hardware.Info Gold Award that we gave the tablet when it came out was definitely not solely due to the optional dock.
As we'll discuss further on, is the Prime still sold with Android 3.2 (Honeycomb). That is also the software on our review tablet. As soon as there is a Prime available with Ice Cream Sandwich, we will test the tablet again and also see whether it qualifies for any awards at that time. Things that were not addressed in this review will be tested in the upcoming review.
