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First Quad-Core Android Tablet Reviewed
adeelarshad82 writes "The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime happens to the first Quad-Core Android Tablet, which also makes it the fastest and most powerful tablet. The secret ingredient is Nvidia's five-core Tegra 3 chipset, including four cores which work together at up to 1.4GHz each and a 'companion core' which runs alone. When tested on the Antutu system benchmark, the Prime scored a breathtaking 10,619, which is roughly double the score of even fast devices like the HTC Jetstream. Benchmark results for Sunspider and Browsermark browsing scored at 17ms and 98324, respectively, which also happened to be amongst the best. The tablet weighs 1.3 pounds and measures 10.4 by 7.1 inches, but it's very slim at 0.3 inches."
By all accounts they sold 1.6 million of 'em, which isn't bad for a few months on a new product - about $2B the first half year. To have the next gen come so soon after is quite awesome. The original one will continue to sell on a long tail for some time, since it's great and has the best port mix of all Android tablets.
I've got one, and it rocks. Updates come quick and I'm really looking forward to ICS. All the apps I bought for my phone just automagically are available on the tablet and work great. Other tablet platforms might have a "limited apps" issue, but apparently Android was well designed to scale to different resolutions since version 1.6 oh, so long ago. If you get one, try "Corby." Google Talk is also nice - it lets me video chat with the kids when I'm away from home on business. Kindle is essential - I just downloaded "At Napoleon's Side in Russia", the journal of Armand De Caulaincourt of the Napoleonic siege of Moscow that many years later disheartened the Nazi invaders as told here. I'm gaining a new respect for the strength of the Russian people's character, which isn't a benefit I expected from a geek toy. The miniHDMI port is handy for giving presentations in conference rooms because the included Polaris Office handles Powerpoints nicely, and for reference docs there's PDF. It does Flash, which is nice when I want to research what the Internet is for.
The launch of the Transformer Prime solves my biggest problem with the Transformer: holding on to the damned thing. Apparently my wife and kids (and grandson) are fond of these apps and want to use my tablet all day. Now I can hand it down to them and get me the Prime. Sweet.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I don't care how fast it can run angry birds. I just care about the improved battery life this core provides!
The weighted companion core will never threaten to stab you and in fact cannot speak.
How is the battery?
You won't see the blinding speed when you're poking around the main UI or some of Google's apps, as they're occasionally nonresponsive, although screen transitions are a bit more fluid than on other Android tablets.
I wonder when this will finally be solved. Previously, the lag was blamed on poor hardware. With this beast, that excuse really does not hold at all anymore.
If it's not at least as light as ipad2/gtab then is not going to make it.
I'll be praying for 3.0 seconds when all 5 cores are running.
I'd like to ask why things are so bad at the other end of the spectrum... Why do we need to buy these high-end devices just to guarantee we'll have a tolerable user experience?
Specifically, why do inexpensive Android Tablets and Phones have such horrendous touch-screens?
I can name names. My big surprise was my recent purchase of a Samsung Transform Ultra... Which, at $230 didn't seem like a cheapo device compared to the many $99 android phones. Yet the touch screen was so horrible and glitchy that it was IMPOSSIBLE to use Swype to type anything but the shortest words. Assuming that couldn't possibly be a "feature" of a brand-name, mass-market android phone, I exchanged it for another, which had exactly the same problem. Plenty of forums with people complaining about the same thing, and saying Samsung hasn't offered any help.
The same is true of cheap tablets I've used. The touch-screens may be glitchy, or they may be painfully unresponsive and dog-slow. With a few these are adjustable via tunables in /sys, but sadly, most are not.
Why do so many devices, where the touch-screen is the primary and usually SOLE method of INPUT, fail so miserably in providing just a usable touch-screen?
That's really what these pricey tablets have going for them... The cheap knock-offs cut one-too-many corners, and there's nothing in-between high end devices, and low-end junk.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime happens to the first Quad-Core Android Tablet, which also makes it the fastest and most powerful tablet.
Wait, what? How did this obvious piece of corporate self-promotion get to the front page?
"The most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough." -- Eric S. Raymond
i ran the browser mark test on chrome running on my core i3 laptop. 380000. on a dual core at 2.26ghz. this new tablet thing has 5 (five?!?!) cores at 1.4ghz and it gets only 98000?? is this because arm sucks or because android sucks?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
10 hours, near enough. 14 with the keyboard/dock/extended battery. In actual use charging once a week. Nice try though.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Regarding tablet apps, they are a bit harder to find because Android developers roll their tablet versions into the same app as their non-tablet versions. None of this iOS "buy the app for your phone, buy the tablet "HD" version for three times the price". Android does scale on it's own, but you'd be surprised how many apps actually have special tablet layouts built-in.
My personal favorite tablet app has to be DSLR Controller, though it also runs on some phones (tiny tiny buttons). I'm getting the Prime as soon as it is out in my country just to use this app.
The Android Market does have a "tablet picks" section, but Google is horrible at updating their selections.
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"The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime happens to the first Quad-Core Android Tablet, which also makes it the fastest and most powerful tablet."
Can I have some of what he's having ? Both parts of that statement are quite probably true, but one is not due to the other. Various upcoming (very soon) dual-core chips are rumored to be faster than nVidia's quad-core Tegra3. All in all, it would not surprise me one bit if it is true, because nVidia is known to make weak mobile chips. Tegra 1 & 2 completely underwhelmed, Tegra3 is expected to do the same.
nVidia is great at marketing, sure. They've spent a lot of money on making sure that people thought the Tegra2 was a fast chip, while in reality it is completely blown away by the competitor's chips. Honeycomb isn't just slow because it's Honeycomb and only partly GPU accelerated - the Tegra2 is really just too weak to properly run it, and most (high end) Android tablets out there are based on the Tegra2. It is really weak on floating point calculus, and the GPU... let's just say, even if Honeycomb was properly hardware accelerated, it'd still be slow.
If you look at the raw performance of for example Samsung's Exynos offerings, or the Texas Instrument's OMAPs, the difference is quite frankly staggering.
The cheezy touchscreens are resistive and have one point of control. The capacitive touchscreens have to be licensed so the tech costs more, but have up to ten simultaneous touchpoints and things like pressure sensitivity. Buying a license to the patents costs money.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There is an error in TFA and summary. The result from SunSpider benchmark should be about 1.7 s (1685 ms), not 17 ms. With Intel L2400 (1.66 GHz, 2 cores) on Chrome I'm getting 0.66 s.
Cell phone, tablet processors are becoming more powerful by the day, much faster than the desktop processors. Will there be a day when tablet processors are as fast as the desktop ones and we would just be hooking phone/tablet to monitors? (though we should solve the heat dissipation problem)
Although Asus is just behind Samsung among companies that are learning fast how to take on Apple, it is a really bad decision to launch this device without an upgrade to ICS 4.0. Honeycomb is never going to compete in the tablet market. Even if it has reached the point of being quite usable, there are hardly any tablet specific apps available, the iPad is so far ahead. No one outside the geeky world is going to care about quad core, especially when the software experience still lags so far behind Apple, and the iPad still has a better GPU so it can look flashier playing games. The Prime is an incredibly sleek device but it is badly let down by the software, I still don't understand how they can make an incredible device and launch it with awful software.
Google need to convince developers to make tablet apps for Android. They also need to distinguish Google Android tablets from cheap chinese junk that has really damaged Android's reputation. The slow laggy bloated bloatware infested Android phones and tablets that major manufacturers have released haven't helped either of course.
It would be a terrible failure for Google if having a two year lead over Windows 8 they still can't develop a decent tablet OS and ecosystem to take on Apple.
But is this tablet compatible with the metric system?
The secret ingredient is Nvidia's five-core Tegra 3 chipset
You really think these compact machines use sets of chips? Quite the opposite. They're systems on a chip (SoC), often even a package on a package (PoP) i.e multiple chips layered into one package. Now, don't get smart and point out that technically a PoP is a chipset - they're used for packing an SoC with DRAM and flash memory. The multiple functions of a chipset (e.g peripheral interfaces) are all on the one chip of the SoC.
"Cell phone, tablet processors are becoming more powerful by the day, much faster than the desktop processors. Will there be a day when tablet processors are as fast as the desktop ones and we would just be hooking phone/tablet to monitors? (though we should solve the heat dissipation problem)"
Never, with the reason is access to electricity, not necessarily the heat dissipation as such.
Still, the tablets of today may outperform the top-of-the-line CPUs of yesterday. But the time gap is there due to energy requirements, where the battery-powered line-up has the lower hand.
Still, the effect-size may not be that relevant in the very near future. If you can do whatever task that most people do, then the innate upper hand of a desktop CPU may not matter.
As it seems, former high-end tasks like 3D gaming, 1080p video etc is no real match for many slate CPUs. It will be the apps (tasks) that set the limits in the future too.
What is really irritating is the lack of unbiased reviews for both iOS and Android devices. The reviewer Mr. Segan has clearly never looked at an Android device or used one. I haven't either (I have 2 iPads and an iPhone 4, not to mention I'm typing this on an Macbook Air) but I can see a few glaring errors or (un)intentional biased spins in his review. First of all he claims that he can only play with a joypad in landscape mode. This is because he plugged in the controller and plugging in is only possible with the use of the keyboard dock which has the USB port. So why didn't he use the six axis in normal bluetooth mode? The Tegra 3 is compatible with PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii controllers. I doubt that you have to play in landscape mode if you use a wireless controller. The he talks about bugs in the operating system. I routinely have to reboot my iPad if I want to use the USB plug or it isn't recognised, so why doesn't he mention that? Then he says that it is so hard to find apps that take advantage of the Tegra 3. iOS has thousands of apps! There are three things wring with this remark, First of all, the Tegra 3 is a hardware change. To have thousands of apps ready for this one tablet, Asus could have sent hundreds of programmers a free Prime. However, that's very unrealistic. The iPad 2 had very few apps specifically meant to take advantage of the new A5 processor. It actually still has only a few. Mr. Segan then goes on that there are only 25 games in the Tegra zone. So other Android apps don't work with the Prime? The last thing that bothered me is the usual comparison with the iPad that pervades the whole review. A sentence as "extra-bright 600 nit mode, which takes the screen from slightly dimmer than the Apple iPad 2's ($499, 4.5 stars) to somewhat brighter, albeit at the cost of battery life" just reeks of bias. Why doesn't he mention that the 600 nit mode is specifically meant for outdoor use, where my iPad fails miserably?
Anyway, I'm really looking for a replacement of my iPad. After jailbreak it performs reasonably well but the freedom that Android allows and the fact that the specter of Steve isn't looking over my shoulder will probably make me buy the Transformer Prime or one of the other Tegra3 tablets coming out.
No 3G. No 4G. No 3G. No 3G.
the funny thing is the processor (SoC) in these things is not even the big ticket item. the display and touch tends to big part of the cost, and on the really nice ones the industrial design tends to cost a fair bit (thin components, forged or milled metal, etc).
You could probably build a chip knock-off tablet with quad core and only have it cost a few bucks more than a low-end single core tablet. of course market demand means you can likely charge a whole lot more than a few bucks.
kindle fire is the in-between. it's not super high end specs, it's inexpensive, but works fairly well, unlike the knock-off tablets.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'm getting one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have an Acer Iconia Tab (It was side by side with the Transformer at Best Buy, but the $100 gift card sold me on the Acer). Same processor as the Transformer. I love it - lots of ports, fast, and as another poster said, apps from my android phone automagically appear on the Iconia.
I find it interesting talking to people about it. Their first words are, "Oh, you have an iPad?" Then the description of Android begins. Generally I get two responses: they either glaze over, or they say, "So it's an iPad knock off, then?".
The other night, coming back from a bar carrying my Acer, I slipped stepping on a friends boat. I went down, one foot in the water, the other on my knee (torn ligaments and a cast now). Where was the Iconia? Sometime during my fall, I managed to carefully lay it on the deck. I don't even remember doing it. Body broken, tablet fine. Even subconsciously I love this tablet.
I'll wait for the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Megatron, that'll be totally badass!
How long before Hasbro decides it's lawsuit time?
Yay, another great piece of hardware crippled by a phone OS. There have been reports of Ubuntu and Gentoo on Tegra systems, but they seem to involve a lot of ugly hacks. Probably because of all the closed bits in hardware/firmware. If only something like this were actually available in stores...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Maybe the "beast" was compiled with a Dalek compiler by mistake .....now it makes you wait then EXTERMINATE, EX..TER...MINATE
Come on, you know nobody in their right mind will ever buy a tablet.
Sent from my iPad
There is nothing to solve, it's a deliberate tradeoff. You can get guaranteed maximum latencies on all operations, but you get worse average case performance. So what people do in practice is that they optimize for the average case and try to detect and limit the worst case so that it isn't too bad.
The kind of operations that cause these glitches are usually related to resource allocation: garbage collection, reference counting cascades, disk reorganization. Error recovery and recalibration on storage media can also cause it. Uninterruptible tasks are another source of lag, and again, these are usually made uninterruptible because it allows to code to run faster (otherwise you'd need more locks and logic). Some of these are beyond the reaches of the operating system (e.g., in the Flash controller).
The obvious remark that someone could make is "spec don't matter, the ipad will prevail". This device is going to be the acid test of that theory. Here, finally, is a device at the same price point with unarguably more processor power and a bigger scree and more ports. It's running the first mature (in my opinion) android OS. Will this compete with the ipad when nothing else has?
What is also instructive is that the benches show that all the processor power is very helpful for graphics and math computing but relatively unimportant for many things people use tablets for like checking e-mail and surfing or watching a video. Other things like touch lag or seemless integration or simplicity of syncing are likely to be concerns. What buyers know is that if they buy an ipad they won't regret it. But they worry about the transformer. Will the processor spec overwhelm in interface concerns?
This will be very interesting to watch. it puts out a marker for both the tegra concept and a technical challenge for the ipad 3
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm in for 2.
However, I couldn't find the "BUY" button anywhere on the page. What good is an advertisement if it doesn't link to a shopping cart?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I could read PDFs in full-screen. 14" diagonal is about equivalent to 8.5"x11". As a scientist, half of what I do seems to be reading articles in PDF format.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Translated into units that most of can understand: " The tablet weighs 590g and measures 26.4 by 18 cm, but it's very slim at 7.6mm.
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
... Value. If they give these things away for free in a box of Cracker Jack, then I just might buy a box of Cracker Jack. 'Nough said Jako!
Read some of the comments here:
https://plus.google.com/105051985738280261832/posts/XAZ4CeVP6DC