Quick thoughts on the ASUS Transformer Prime - Day 1
OK so I got my ASUS Transformer Prime yesterday and played around with it for about 4 hours and then it upgraded to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) - talk about timing! Here are some initial impressions of the device after about a day of use:
- I love the form-factor. I wasn’t sure what the advantage of a wide-screen tablet over the iPad2’s 4:3 display would be, other than watching movies, but it turns out it makes a HUGE difference with web browsing. This alone could be the single biggest reason I switch from the iPad2 to the Prime.
- Widgets are great on a tablet - I have my day’s agenda, the 5 day weather forecast, and work email previewed on my desktop. Try doing that on an iPad.
- The build quality is great, I like the look of the spun metal back. The microSD slot is fantastic; imagine being able to load music and movies to your tablet without the agony of iTunes - pure joy. And I can swap memory cards out which allows me to carry a larger library of videos on trips, nice.
- The reported Wi-Fi signal strength is lower than both my phone or iPad2 show, however I’ve had no issues connecting or staying connected to the networks at my office or my home, so it hasn’t been an issue for me.
- I don’t have a cover yet, and even though the screen is Gorilla Glass I still worry about scratching it up in my briefcase. I’m trying to track down one of the cool origami covers but no luck yet. It’s really hard to use this to take notes in meetings when you can’t prop it up.
- My keyboard dock, ordered back in December when I ordered the Prime, still isn’t here yet. That was really the big differentiator as to why I ordered the Prime in the first place, since I am very happy with the iPad2 overall (I just hate dealing with iTunes and I hate the dumb-downed desktop UI). Looking forward to trying out the keyboard and taking advantage of the USB port and full-size SD card slot.
- Speaking of keyboards, a year and a half of using iPads must really have me trained on the Apple keyboard. I couldn’t type accurately at all with the ASUS keyboard, and the Android keyboard doesn’t let me “punch through” to enough special characters, punctuation or numbers (sorry, I don’t want to pull up an alternate keyboard to type a number). So I am trying out Swiftkey X Tablet (I use Swiftkey X almost exclusively on my HTC Amaze and EVO 3D) and for the most part I like it, but the keys feel to stretched out (maybe the keyboard doesn’t need to be “widescreen”) and the space bar seems to high up, I keep missing it with my thumb. I need to play around with the settings some more. The “neon” skin does look really cool though. Also the keyboard icon in the notification tray makes it really easy to switch back n’ forth between different keyboards.
- The two page manual that comes in the box with the Prime says the full manual is on the device or online. I couldn’t find it anywhere on the Prime itself so I downloaded it from the website. Still would like to have a better understanding of the “balanced” and “performance” power modes.
- The notification bar at the bottom of ICS is simply great - notifications are a dream compared to the implementation in iOS5 and the task-switcher display, ASUS shortcuts for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc. are stylish and functional. You can deal with specific notification types individually by tapping their icon in the tray, or hit the corner to display all the notifications and swipe them away one by one or hit the X to clear them all. Perfect.
- One drawback to the notification bar is that its persistent. Even when you’re playing a video full screen you loose those pixels because it never goes away. Now it does do clever things like fade to tiny dots when you’re viewing a video so its not as distracting, but I would have preferred an option to have it go away entirely (like the Slingbox player on the iPad does). As I mentioned before I keep missing the space bar on the keyboard; I wonder if that would be an issue if the notification bar was at the top of the display instead of the bottom.
- There are no multi-touch gestures to swipe between apps as there are on iOS5 - that’s something I’d gotten used to. Still the recent apps button handles that function for the most part.
- This one is going to sound weird: there’s not much difference between Honeycomb and ICS to me. I’m sure there’s plenty under the hood but overall it didn’t really seem that different other than the color theme and style in Settings. I received my Prime in the afternoon and played with it for about 4 hours before the ICS update became available; after it loaded I felt I’d already accomplished most of my learning curve using Honeycomb. I do like the new day/night views in the ASUS My Water II wallpaper, though.
- The browser is great: I love the quick vertical scrollbar that pops up when you touch the screen, makes it really quick and easy to scroll to the bottom of a long page, and bookmark syncing with the desktop version of Chrome is awesome.
- I have a lot of apps on my iPad2 and so far have most of the same functionality on my Prime (the major key difference being games, I don’t use them much anyway on the iPad so I probably won’t re-buy them even if they’re available). I did have an odd issue where the demo of Riptide vanished from my Prime after upgrading to ICS - maybe its incompatible or something. I think the biggest gap I’ll have is magazines I’ve subscribed to in Newstand that may not exist in Android. My Zinio magazines are fine, of course, and the app looks and runs great on the Prime.
- I’m not buying any duplicate apps however until I get a chance to try out the keyboard dock - I have a feeling that’s the accessory that will make or break my decision on the Prime. Now if I can just find one.
- My big complaint about Android tablet apps is that because apps designed for phone resolutions play nicely with the larger tablet resolutions, Android developers have been slow to build tablet-specific versions. Twitter is a great example. On the iPad they’ve created a really slick tablet client that has a slide-out browser integrated in so when you click a tweet you can see a web link’s results right within the app. On the Prime (or any Android tablet), what you get is the same app you run on your phone but it looks like you just hit the “maximize” button. It doesn’t look crappy like when you use an iPhone app on your iPad and you hit the 2x button and everything is jaggy - the fonts are great and everything is clear and crisp, but it just isn’t taking advantage of the tablet’s real estate to provide better or additional functionality.
- Comixology is another good example. On the iPad it has this great UI for browsing the store and viewing your collection. On the Prime its the stripped down “mobile” view and while it works, it looks like crap. The plus side is the comics themselves display beautifully on the Prime and actually are better suited to the 16x9 dimensions of the display, and thus come closer to filling the screen and are easier to read.
- I was bummed ICS on the Prime doesn’t support Face Lock - it has a front facing camera, after all. I also wanted to use a PIN for my lock code like I do in my iPad2 but because the PIN length is variable with Android (which some people may like) you have to hit OK after entering a 4 digit pin. Surprisingly that extra step turned out to be a pain in the ass to me, I kept forgetting to hit OK and waited for the screen to unlock. So I switched back to drawing a pattern - not as secure, but more fun anyway and way quicker to enter.
- ICS for the Prime was release last night - today Adobe updates Flash for ICS. Nice timing. And it seems to work well, although I had to do a reboot of the device after Flash updated via the market to get it to work correctly.
- As I said I really don’t play many games on my iPad2 so I haven’t tried too many out on the Prime yet - a pinball game and the glowball demo are about it. They are impressive though.
- I’m not a huge Gmail user; my work email is on Microsoft Exchange and I’ve had my Yahoo email address for years. The email client is fine, but nothing spectacular. I much prefer HTC’s email clients. The ICS one makes me hit “show pictures” to see embedded graphics for every single email (I can’t find a setting for this, if there is one please let me know!). Still it works and the syncing between Exchange for mail, contacts and calendars is perfect, just like on my Android phones.
So there’s some initial impressions of the device. So far I like it, but even with ICS it feels like it’s a device for Android power users (which suits me fine). I probably wouldn’t try and give this to my wife to replace her iPad. I just hope app developers start to pay attention to the Android tablet market sooner than later, and with everything that’s going on at CES right now I’m expecting that could probably happen. Really looking forward to my keyboard dock and origami cover!
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