New Toys: Transformer Prime

It’s been two weeks now, give or take. And I love this device. Looooooooove it. Oh, there’s a few flaws (every once in a while, it’ll burp when an app shuts down, and reboot the tablet), but it’s pretty much exactly what I need for 90% of the stuff I do with a computer these days.

For those who don’t know, the Transformer Prime is the first Tegra 3 tablet. If you want more specs than that, well, check out either of those links, and you’ll get ‘em. Performance-wise, it’s fast. Blindingly so. I’ve not managed to make it chug at all, and I Have a bad tendency to leave everything running indefinitely, and never actually shut the thing down, just put it into standby.

My Prime, with the keyboard attachement, sitting on top of my 17″ Compaq.

The weight is just about perfect. @dogandgarden has a Transformer, the previous generation, Tegra2 model. The Prime is dramatically lighter in hand, and thinner as well. Given the screen size is the same, the edges are a fair approximation of the original, minus a few thirds of an inch in any direction. What this means is that I can use it as a reader almost indefinitely: it weighs about the same as a trade-paperback.

What this also means is that it’s perfect for the stuff I want to read. Articles, especially long ones (I have a lot of love for the LongReads RSS feed) fit perfectly, via GReader Pro. The only issue I’ve found so far is that video doesn’t play in GReader Pro since the update to Ice Cream Sandwich. Flip it out to the right browser, though, and it works just fine, and hopefully, GReader will get fixed fairly soon.

The form factor and weight also make it perfect for reading comics: this is something I’d avoided on my Samsung Captivate because a 4” screen is still not quite enough to read comics on. By the same token, it’s perfect for online magazines, which render beautifully.

The same is true for ebooks. I’ve been spending more and more time reading on my phone in the last year, and this just brings it up to real-world level. I can read this thing for hours without any more fatigue than I’ve had from reading a turn-the-pages book for the same length of time.

Gaming performance is what you’d expect for an Nvidia chipset, especially a class-leading one. Stellar. I tend to bounce in and out of games and my other stuff, and it never misses a beat. To be honest, though, gaming is a bonus. It’s not why I bought the device.

There has been some minor weirdness since Asus rolled out the Over-The-Air update from Honeycomb to Ice Cream Sandwich.

The primary one of these is the mentioned weirdness in video playback.

I noticed it first in GReader Pro: the video would simply not play: just do a load and pause routine. So, I tried popping it open with the display in web browers button, and same problem there. I’ve used the Dolphin browser on my phone for ages, and I have a lot of love for it, but I wasn’t able to use the button (either in GReader Pro, or Dolphin) to bump into the Youtube app (which wouldn’t have helped with things like Vimeo, anyway). I even tried ‘sharing’ as an email, then copying the link, but when I tried to share as email I got consistent “this link is either deleted or unavailable”: for some reason GReader Pro had stopped linking properly to the video that was embedded. And, surprisingly, so had Dolphin HD. I found the same problem with the OEM Browser.

So, after a little research, I found I wasn’t the only one with this problem. While there wasn’t a fix, different browsers were, apparently, showing different reactions to the situation. Opera for Mobile, sadly, had the same problem. SkyFire was a little better, but had huge issues with Vimeo; it only displayed a big, black box where the video was supposed to be.

However, after switching, on recommendation, to BOAT Browser, most of the problems cleared up. GReader Pro is still an issue, but with BOAT as my default browser, I can open the page in the browser from GReader Pro, and it renders properly.

This is, now that I have a work around, a minor irritant at worst. Hopefully, this’ll help out other people, as I don’t think this is an issue with the Prime, but rather with apps interactions with Ice Cream Sandwich.

It should also be noted that the first thing I did in BOAT is set it to represent itself as a desktop client, not a mobile client. The 10” screen on the Prime is more than enough to render well-designed webpages as they’re meant to be seen, and not on their stripped-down mobile sites.

I’m also still getting used to the keyboard. But I can see this add-on being invaluable in the long term for me, as it makes my tablet nearly a complete replacement for my laptop.

The keyboard is somewhere between ¾ and 7/8 the size of a regular keyboard. What this means is that I get my ‘pinkie stretches’ wrong occasionally when I’m touch-typing. Otherwise, it’s brilliant. The trackpad on it doesn’t get in the way of my typing, and is pretty responsive. As soon as you dock the tablet to the keyboard, it pops a little pointer on the screen, and you’re off to the races.

The battery system in the keyboard is superbly smart too: it really does just charge up your tablet from the keyboard, under the correct assumption that that’s the one you’d want fully charged when you de-dock. Which means it makes sense to store your table on the keyboard when you’re not using it: it’s basically a big, extended battery pack.

Battery life itself is excellent. I was off sick the other day, and spent the day drifting in and out of sleep on the couch, watching Netflix on TV. In the meantime, the Prime kept me company. Read my multiple GReader Pro feeds (I think you’ve figured out by now that this is one of my primary apps), caught up on my Long Reads feed, which I’d neglected since about Christmas, browsing, social media, and games (specifically, FieldRunners HD, Pixel Rain, Wordsmith, and a Zuma clone). In ‘normal’ mode (you can switch from power-saver, normal, and performance in the taskbar/status area with a touch) I got about eighteen hours of use (including standby) with about thirty-percent left in the keyboard, and sixty-five percent left in the tablet itself. I can see an EASY seventy-two hour charging cycle, especially if you do thinks like turning off wifi and Bluetooth when you’re sleeping, even if you don’t shut down completely. Also, if you don’t geek out on the sheer power of the device, and install the matrix-style live wallpaper to chew up power (but it’s SO PRETTY).

I only had honeycomb on the tablet for a couple of days before ICS was pushed out for it, so it’s hard to compare the differences. But it definitely feels like the battery is lasting longer.

I also spent that time using my phone as a wireless access point, rather than my home network, because I wanted to see what mobile data usage was like on a day like that.

If you have less than 2gb a month, you don’t want to use your phone/tablet in this combination often. However, with a complete (and large) game download (42meg) I topped out at about 200meg for the day’s usage. The speed was probably twenty-five percent slower than my home network, visibly, but definitely useful, especially if you set your phone/WAP up where it gets strong HSPA signal. And better still if you have LTE, I guess. Some of us ain’t that lucky!

What I found out though is that with my old 6gb a month plan, I could do days like this every day, and still have plenty left over. Admittedly, this is less a test of the tablet, but the use of the two in conjunction is important to me.

As a footnote, it should be noted that my 3000Mah extended battery didn’t fare anywhere near as well as the tablet. I had to plug the phone in after about twelve hours acting as an access point: I was at 15% battery remaining.

I’m waiting for my very cheap, very basic neoprene sleeve to be delivered. Hopefully, it’ll be soon, because while the brushed aluminum (in grey, which definitely has a sheen of purple) is beautiful, I’ve already got two or three scratches on the back of the tablet from putting it down on the coffee table. If you don’t protect it, you’re going to scratch it, and the same goes for the base of the keyboard (although less of an issue: it has rubber feet keeping the aluminum off the surface you’re putting it on). Just having something to slide the whole assembly into, and/or place it on top of instead of the hard/dirty/gritty surface of a table, will make all the difference. Expect to see some battle damage though.

Unless I wanted the familiarity of my laptop for looking up issues relating to the tablet, or photoshop crunching, I’ve not turned it (the laptop) on since I got the tablet. There’s just no point. The tablet, so far, appears to be good enough that I can ditch my laptop for everything, and probably even go back to a full-on desktop, if I want to. And I’ll be honest, that’s not something I expected to happen. As I said at the start, for 90% of my daily usage, the tablet is not only capable, but better than my laptop. I’m interested to see how I feel about things after a few months, but for the moment, the honeymoon is in full swing. The only downsides are what appears to be first-out-the-gate issues with ICS, and I expect those’ll get fixed as time, and apps, develop for it.