Asus Transformer Prime

For quite a while not I've wanted to get either a tablet or a laptop to use at home.  For the most part I wanted something that I could use in the living room while watching my daughter Adeline play, so that I'm not sitting off in my office separate from her and my wife.  After doing a bunch of research, I decided that I wanted to purchase the Asus Transformer Prime.

I had seen the Asus Transformer when it first came out, but didn't pull the trigger because it was the first generation and I wanted to wait until it had gone through at least one evolution.  When the Prime was announced, I immediately knew that's what I wanted.  The Prime is the first tablet with the Nvida quad core processor.  In reality, it actually has five cores, the fifth being called the companion core.  The fifth core is a low power core that takes care of simple tasks so that the more power hungry cores don't need to spool up until necessary.  This helps the tablet achieve impressive battery life.

I purchased the 32 GB model (wifi only), though for $100 more there is a 64 GB model available.  The best part of the Transformer series, other than the badass name, is that for $150 you can purchase a full keyboard dock for it that turns it into a laptop.  The dock has a full QWERTY keyboard along with a bunch of Android specific buttons to help navigate the operating system.  If you're use to a full-sized keyboard, the chicklet keyboard can take some getting use to, but for anyone who has used a small laptop before, it feels great and is easy to type on.

Another great feature of the Transformer Prime is it's expandability in terms of memory.  The tablet itself has a microSD slot.  In stead of paying the extra $100 for the 64 GB model, I purchased a 32 GB microSD card from Newegg for $40.  The keyboard dock also has a full size SD Card slot which I threw another 32 GB card in.  Now I'm up to 96 GB for an additional $56.  The keyboard dock also has USB, which would allow you to throw in a USB thumb drive, attach an external hard drive, or even use a USB game controller. As a side note, you can actually use Bluetooth came controllers, such as the controller off your PS3.

The other great thing about the keyboard dock is that it also includes and additional battery.  By itself, the tablet has 9-10 hours of battery life, but when you put it in the dock, you can get 19 hours of use between charging.  For someone who spends a fair amount of time in airports traveling, that extra battery life really comes in handy.  I'm no longer a slave to finding a power outlet and sitting in some nasty airport corner just to stay charged.  I can have a layover or two and still not worry about running out of juice.

The screen on the Prime is also fantastic.  It's called a Super IPS display and is over twice as bright as the iPad 2 display, which is great for sitting outside on the porch, drinking wine in the sun while stalking on Facebook.  Of course you can easily dial back the brightness while indoors in order to save battery life.

Overall I've been very impressed with the Prime.  When I'm just sitting on the couch reading the news, I can use it as a tablet.  If I plan on doing a lot of typing (such as writing this blog post), I can throw it in the dock and use it like a laptop.  I really like the fact that I can use my microSD and SD cards to expand the memory.  Now when I travel I can have an SD card with 32 GB of music, and another one with 32 GB of movies, and still have tons of room for pictures and other media.

Overall I would definitely recommend the Transformer Prime.  Lots of battery life, a great screen, expandable memory capacity, and an awesome keyboard dock.  What more could you want?