Review: ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime

Software

Android

Let's get the obvious disappointment out of the way first; if you've been licking your lips in anticipation of an Ice Cream Sandwich, keep licking as there's no sign of Google's latest Android release just yet.

Recent rumours have suggested that an ICS update (Android 4.x) could be made available to the Transformer Prime as soon as next month, but when the tab-vertible hits stores, it'll do so sporting largely the same Honeycomb software (Android 3.x) that adorned its predecessor.

There are a few subtle differences, including the ability to close apps from the recent apps list and a choice of three power profiles, but this is very much the Honeycomb interface you've seen before, and it's an interface that has left us with mixed feelings.

Granted, there are numerous customisation options, and the live chop-and-change widgets are nice, but the OS as a whole doesn't feel as fresh or as interesting as the rest of the Prime. Fans of Android will of course feel right at home, but we still see the software as a not-yet-ideal stopgap between iOS and Windows 7. It isn't as fully featured as the later, and it isn't as neat or as easy to use as the former.

And there are mixed results on the performance front, too. The added power of the Tegra 3 processor certainly helps in areas - swiping between Honeycomb's multiple home screens felt notably smooth - but the overall Android experience still suffers from the occasional stutter while you wait for apps to load and the web-browsing experience doesn't feel any swifter than the iPad 2.

The Prime doesn't feel as fast as the underlying hardware suggests it should, but we reckon this is more to do with Android optimisation than the quad-core Tegra 3 processor. Rest assured, we'll be taking the Transformer Prime for another spin when Ice Cream Sandwich becomes available.

Apps

ASUS pre-loads the Transformer Prime with a wide range of apps - including the likes of @Vibe Music, WebStorage, MyLibrary, SuperNote, Polaris Office and Amazon Kindle - but it's the games that stand out. A fair few are in place to showcase the capabilities of the Tegra 3 chip, and they do a mighty fine job of it, too.

ShadowGun, pictured above, is one of the stand-out titles and looks almost too good to be true. You expect tablet gaming to consist of Angry Birds or Solitaire, but the Tegra 3-optimised version of ShadowGun proves that tablet gaming can be so much more. Ok, so the game's not exactly imaginative (it's best described as a toned-down Gears of War), but it still looks great and it shows off the potential of Tegra 3 with lovely, rippling water effects, improved textures and better rag-doll physics.

It looks impressive, and if you need another show-off poster child, fire up NVIDIA's own Tegra 3 demo, Glowball. Designed to showcase the chip's dynamic lighting and real-time physics capabilities, Glowball looks mesmerising, but while the on-screen result is stunning, it is just a demo, and most games on the Android marketplace aren't optimised to take advantage of Tegra 3's extra horsepower. And that brings us on to what's arguably the Transformer Prime's biggest shortcoming; app availability.

As a crude test, I asked my fiancée (a tech-novice-turned-fervent-admirer of the iPad) to give me a list of 10 apps she uses on a regular basis. All 10 are listed above, and many of them simply aren't available from the Android marketplace - at least not in tablet-optimised form.

The above is of course a tiny snapshot of the overall app landscape, and there are two sides to this argument; there are Android apps that aren't available to iOS. However, as far as the bigger picture is concerned, there's no denying the fact that Apple's app store offers the largest collection of apps, and where apps are available on multiple platforms, we've generally found the iOS variant to be superior in terms of quality.

One could argue that Android's Flash-capable browser negates the need for so many dedicated apps, but we'd like the option nonetheless. And why exactly hasn't there been an explosion of Honeycomb-optimised apps? It's hard to say, but the lack of a killer Android tablet might have something to do with it. We're hoping the arrival of the Transformer Prime and Ice Cream Sandwich will encourage developers to introduce more Android tablet-optimised apps, and in turn Google needs to make it easier to find big-screen apps in the Marketplace.

There are some big names in the above list, and unless the likes of Sky, LOVEFiLM, Facebook and the BBC embrace the Android tablet, the iPad will continue to be the obvious choice for casual users.