ASUS has opened up pre-orders for what might be one of the hottest tablets of the season; the Eee Pad Transformer Prime. Priced at $499 for both the US and Canada, pre-orders can be purchased at Amazon, B&H, Best Buy, GameStop and TigerDirect in the US, and at Future Shop and NCIX in Canada.
There are a couple of reasons I’m more excited about this tablet than any other. For one, it’s fast. It features an NVIDIA Tegra “quad-core” SoC, capable of fast multi-tasking and the best possible gaming on a tablet right now, and boasts battery-life ratings of up to 18 hours when the add-on keyboard is connected. The fact that ASUS will be updating the OS to Ice Cream Sandwich once able is another major plus.
ASUS has long gone the extra mile in terms of aesthetics with its mobile devices, but to me, the Transformer Prime is the best-looking tablet out there. It has a slick metallic “spun” finish both on the tablet itself and the add-on keyboard, and a glossy black front finishes off what’s a great-looking offering.
Unlike a lot of the budget tablets coming out right now, the Transformer Prime has full access to the Android Marketplace, and also bundles in a bunch of software that I couldn’t find there, such as the Polaris Office suite, and also SuperNote. Whether these are exclusive to ASUS, I’m unsure.
Either way, the Transformer Prime is shaping up to the be the most full-featured tablet out there. Let’s hope it lives up to that once it gets in customer hands.