First Quad-Core Android Tablet Reviewed 218
adeelarshad82 writes "The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime happens to the first Quad-Core Android Tablet, which also makes it the fastest and most powerful tablet. The secret ingredient is Nvidia's five-core Tegra 3 chipset, including four cores which work together at up to 1.4GHz each and a 'companion core' which runs alone. When tested on the Antutu system benchmark, the Prime scored a breathtaking 10,619, which is roughly double the score of even fast devices like the HTC Jetstream. Benchmark results for Sunspider and Browsermark browsing scored at 17ms and 98324, respectively, which also happened to be amongst the best. The tablet weighs 1.3 pounds and measures 10.4 by 7.1 inches, but it's very slim at 0.3 inches."
The original Tranformer is great (Score:5, Interesting)
By all accounts they sold 1.6 million of 'em, which isn't bad for a few months on a new product - about $2B the first half year. To have the next gen come so soon after is quite awesome. The original one will continue to sell on a long tail for some time, since it's great and has the best port mix of all Android tablets.
I've got one, and it rocks. Updates come quick and I'm really looking forward to ICS. All the apps I bought for my phone just automagically are available on the tablet and work great. Other tablet platforms might have a "limited apps" issue, but apparently Android was well designed to scale to different resolutions since version 1.6 oh, so long ago. If you get one, try "Corby." Google Talk is also nice - it lets me video chat with the kids when I'm away from home on business. Kindle is essential - I just downloaded "At Napoleon's Side in Russia", the journal of Armand De Caulaincourt of the Napoleonic siege of Moscow that many years later disheartened the Nazi invaders as told here. [collegehumor.com] I'm gaining a new respect for the strength of the Russian people's character, which isn't a benefit I expected from a geek toy. The miniHDMI port is handy for giving presentations in conference rooms because the included Polaris Office handles Powerpoints nicely, and for reference docs there's PDF. It does Flash, which is nice when I want to research what the Internet is for.
The launch of the Transformer Prime solves my biggest problem with the Transformer: holding on to the damned thing. Apparently my wife and kids (and grandson) are fond of these apps and want to use my tablet all day. Now I can hand it down to them and get me the Prime. Sweet.
Touch lag (Score:5, Interesting)
You won't see the blinding speed when you're poking around the main UI or some of Google's apps, as they're occasionally nonresponsive, although screen transitions are a bit more fluid than on other Android tablets.
I wonder when this will finally be solved. Previously, the lag was blamed on poor hardware. With this beast, that excuse really does not hold at all anymore.
Re:Touch lag (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess 4 cores isn't enough to open menus smoothly. You think at some point they will let the hardware and software engineers talk to each other? Perhaps even get their hands on the product before it ships?
Other end of the spectrum (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to ask why things are so bad at the other end of the spectrum... Why do we need to buy these high-end devices just to guarantee we'll have a tolerable user experience?
Specifically, why do inexpensive Android Tablets and Phones have such horrendous touch-screens?
I can name names. My big surprise was my recent purchase of a Samsung Transform Ultra... Which, at $230 didn't seem like a cheapo device compared to the many $99 android phones. Yet the touch screen was so horrible and glitchy that it was IMPOSSIBLE to use Swype to type anything but the shortest words. Assuming that couldn't possibly be a "feature" of a brand-name, mass-market android phone, I exchanged it for another, which had exactly the same problem. Plenty of forums with people complaining about the same thing, and saying Samsung hasn't offered any help.
The same is true of cheap tablets I've used. The touch-screens may be glitchy, or they may be painfully unresponsive and dog-slow. With a few these are adjustable via tunables in /sys, but sadly, most are not.
Why do so many devices, where the touch-screen is the primary and usually SOLE method of INPUT, fail so miserably in providing just a usable touch-screen?
That's really what these pricey tablets have going for them... The cheap knock-offs cut one-too-many corners, and there's nothing in-between high end devices, and low-end junk.
Re:Other end of the spectrum (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not the screens that are the problem. It's the OS. Android was historically developed without any GPU acceleration requirements, and the OS up through Honeycomb still does most UI drawing on the CPU instead. The lagginess people recognize as "bad touch input" is actually bad drawing, and doesn't exist so much in other OSes that use GPU acceleration for UI elements. For example, Windows Phone 7 renders all UI via the GPU and is generally considered to be much more responsive and smoother than Android despite only supporting single-core CPUs. Ice Cream Sandwich fixes this, but also has hardware requirements that mean very few existing devices will be supported. This is an unfortunate but natural consequence of an open platform with little or no hardware control. The OS developers can't assume things like a GPU will be present, so they have to write for lowest common denominator or consciously exclude devices.
(Note that I'm only talking about OS/launcher behavior. Within apps themselves, developers can make things somewhat better or much, much worse depending on how they handle UI elements.)
Re:Other end of the spectrum (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much because the difference between the bad ones and the good ones is all in the display assembly - it makes up the bulk of the cost. A decent screen and touch interface etc is going to set you back - and then it becomes "an expensive tablet".
There's a reason that the iPad and other Android tablets of similar quality to it are as expensive as they are - if someone could make an equivalent tablet for a lot less (ie, down in the $200 range) they would have done it already. When you go cheap, you've got no choice but to compromise on the screen - the rest of the pieces aren't really adding all that much to the cost.
Re:Summary? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I think it happens to be objectively true for now. Are there any other tablets for sale right now that use a Tegra 3 or any faster or more powerful CPU? The only tablet on the market that even comes close is the HTC Jetstream's Qualcomm Snapdragon at 1.5 GHz, but even the summary says that the Tegra 3 beats it on benchmarks.
Re:The original Tranformer is great (Score:2, Interesting)
Have you dropped it yet? Do you use it on the move? Do you miss the lack of a DVD drive or HDisk in the dock able keyboard. If your use is mainly stationary would not sya a 12 icnh or 13.3 inch screen be better?
Perfect is still a long way off in tablet/smartbooks.
Re:Touch lag (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah sadly it's a general latency problem with Android that doesn't seem to get mentioned.
I write audio software and it's the poor red headed stepchild of IOS in comparison:
http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434 [google.com]
Re:The original Tranformer is great (Score:5, Interesting)
It's got a crack in the corner because I dropped it while dodging a nickel rocket and the rocket blasted it. Apparently the Gorilla glass isn't proof against rocket exhaust. I can live with that little crack as it doesn't impact anything and frankly that was my fault. Yes, I've dropped my Transformer a dozen times, and it's daily handled by kids in the 2-9 year old range without supervision. God only knows what they do with it. It seems to be durable enough for my purposes.
I've ripped a number of DVDs, and downloaded some HD videos and played them on it. It's quite capable - it plays nearly every thing I feed it. Even Dell's .wmv's I've been using it to skill up on their latest gear.
I bought the HDMI cable so if a bigger display suits me better I can have my desktop monitor 23", my bedroom 47", or the the family room 55" without any degradation in quality. I'm coming nearsighted, so this happens a lot. My kids totally dig HD YouTube Zelda videos on the bigscreen, which is improving our bonding.
Perfect is an unachievable goal, but these things are "good enough" and then some.
Re:The original Tranformer is great (Score:5, Interesting)
Lack of DVD or HDD are even in todays laptops more or less legacy thing.
Search earlier slashdot article about DVD needs by laptop owners and you find out that most people have used it only few times.
HDD is not good idea at all for small laptops what can be hold on lap or table or when walking. As there is bigger risk to drop it. But on bigger laptops like 15-19" versions, you want a table for those so HDD is "safe".
But, I would take a 15" tablet, with 2cm thickness so it could have huge battery on it. And demand would be it has a hybrid display with very accurate pen (not a small stylus) and when pen is in use on screen, touch does nothing.
And by my opinion I would definetely take it with Android instead Windows 8.
Re:Other end of the spectrum (Score:5, Interesting)
Hang on. My problem with your analysis is that you're combining two things that are entirely separate... The INPUT and the OUTPUT.
I realize that (eg. AMOLED) displays are expensive. No problem, though... I'm perfectly willing to settle for a lower-res LCD display based on older tech. The Samsung Transform Ultra I mentioned is a perfect example, with a nasty LCD screen-door effect (compared to my Droid) but which I quickly learned to tolerate...
But high-res screen or no, what drives me insane is flaky touch-screen INPUT (not output), and I find it hard to believe that going from a horrible, glitchy capacitive touch screen, to a RELIABLE capacitive touch screen, costs a significant fraction of a phone or tablet's sale price. In many cases, as I said, I'd be willing to bet it might only require a software change.
Furthermore, I'm not sure your statement is actually accurate. All sources I could find point to an iPhone 4's Retina display at about $30:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2010/tc20100627_763714.htm [businessweek.com]
http://www.bgr.com/2011/10/06/apple-maintains-big-margins-on-iphone-4s-according-to-ubm-analysis/ [bgr.com]
Never (Score:5, Interesting)
"Cell phone, tablet processors are becoming more powerful by the day, much faster than the desktop processors. Will there be a day when tablet processors are as fast as the desktop ones and we would just be hooking phone/tablet to monitors? (though we should solve the heat dissipation problem)"
Never, with the reason is access to electricity, not necessarily the heat dissipation as such.
Still, the tablets of today may outperform the top-of-the-line CPUs of yesterday. But the time gap is there due to energy requirements, where the battery-powered line-up has the lower hand.
Still, the effect-size may not be that relevant in the very near future. If you can do whatever task that most people do, then the innate upper hand of a desktop CPU may not matter.
As it seems, former high-end tasks like 3D gaming, 1080p video etc is no real match for many slate CPUs. It will be the apps (tasks) that set the limits in the future too.
Re:Tegra (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The original Tranformer is great (Score:5, Interesting)
One major advantage of the Transformer and many other high end Android tablets is the 1280x800 screen resolution. I stopped using my old Thinkpad because the 1024x768 screen just wasn't very comfortable for viewing web pages or even PDF documents. I wouldn't get a tablet with anything less than 1280x800 now, although my current 13" laptop is a Panasonic Let's Note with 1400xSomethingOrOther screen and a weight of less than 1Kg (including optical drive!)
Re:Touch lag (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is Android isn't really written to be efficient.
Little bit of an exaguration there. Yes, they knowingly traded some efficiency for portability, which includes architecture independence as well as screen resolution/density independence, combined with easy for development. Easily a superior trade at the expense of a few cycles during initial screen load. In other words, you extremely exaggerate the significance here.
As for GC'ing, again you've exaggerated. For the most part programmers have relatively good control of when GC'ing occurs. Furthermore, for static layouts, its trivial to anticipate and the associated load is not worth mentioning even on hardware 1/4 the performance of this device.
a codebase that's frequently convoluted and an architecture that sometimes looks like someone took the Gang of Four book and tried to use every pattern at once. I mean seriously, why does setting a selection on a text view require a selection class rather than a start and end index in the widget?
Sadly, you are spot on here. The code base a total piece of shit. It looks like someone had never written a GUI before and only knew theory of design patterns. Things which should be extremely simple require gobs of vastly over complicated and verbose code. Its a stupid fest. It wonderfully shows that contrary to common myth, Google does employ very inexperience coders and designers. And when combined with the worst of Java, its a really horrible coding experience which leave only but the most naive or inexperienced cursing at the needless over engineering, unjustified complexity, and tiresome verbosity.
As a coder I ran into some UI design (I wrote it) which I couldn't believe was so horrible on the eyes, hard to read, hard to maintain, and yet did so very, very little. It was roughly 17 pages of code. Just out of curiosity, I decided to write it in wxPython. I thought that was relatively fair since Java coders love to compare with Java and frequently push it as superior to Python. The wxPython UI was two pages. The thing is, that massive difference really isn't about Java vs Python (or not the discerning factor), its that wxPython is well written and the Android UI API is about as horribly written as you can possibly make it. Bluntly, most of the UI GUIs in Android are either a complete piece of shit or an all out abomination.
Add to this is the fact that Android UI's are inherently ASYNCHRONOUS. That means you can accidentally push a button multiple times and, for example, have five new windows spawned before the first one renders. Its pretty easy to do in a moving vehicle. And if you don't like this inherent behavior, you have to add a bunch more code to see if the window already exists or not - which absolutely no sample code shows or even hints at the requirement.
I love Android and it has some really cool features, but much of the APIs are absolutely horrible, horrible, horrible and without a doubt show they've been written by people who likely have never even use a computer UI before. And if they have used computer UI's before, then its a strong argument they are retarded.
Re:Touch lag (Score:4, Interesting)
The UI might not be efficient,
The UI is fine, don't be misled by this "laggy" FUD.
I have one of the Tegra 2 Transformers, while my phone is the original Huawei Ideos. Both are completely usable devices, despite the Huawei being massively underpowered on paper.
The Asus Transformer is silky smooth in normal use, easily as slick as the iPads I use at work. I'm sure it's possible for a determined professional to create edge-cases where it can bog down, but in for us mere mortals, that just won't happen.
Must be love (Score:5, Interesting)
I have an Acer Iconia Tab (It was side by side with the Transformer at Best Buy, but the $100 gift card sold me on the Acer). Same processor as the Transformer. I love it - lots of ports, fast, and as another poster said, apps from my android phone automagically appear on the Iconia.
I find it interesting talking to people about it. Their first words are, "Oh, you have an iPad?" Then the description of Android begins. Generally I get two responses: they either glaze over, or they say, "So it's an iPad knock off, then?".
The other night, coming back from a bar carrying my Acer, I slipped stepping on a friends boat. I went down, one foot in the water, the other on my knee (torn ligaments and a cast now). Where was the Iconia? Sometime during my fall, I managed to carefully lay it on the deck. I don't even remember doing it. Body broken, tablet fine. Even subconsciously I love this tablet.
Re:Touch lag (Score:1, Interesting)
No, most of the Android tablets that are more or less on-par with the iPad feel draggy and occasionally glitch. You might not notice, but just about every reviews, and lots of consumers, do.
On some tablets, it's so bad that I can't imagine anyone actually used it before they kicked it out the door. They just checked off boxes on a feature sheet and called it a day. I mean, these are web-browsing devices first and foremost---what does it say when you can barely type into some web forms and the browser feels unpleasant to use.
About the closest to the iPad is RIM's PlayBook. It doesn't have the draggy interface problem. It does have other issues, lots of them, but in RIM's defense they got the fundamentals right. Android, especially on tablets, is shaping up a lot like Windows Mobile: a negligent parent company, a number of stack'em-high-and-sell'em-cheap OEMs and, occasionally, a pigheaded carrier thrown into the mix.
I'm hoping Google's acquisition of Motorola forces the other OEMs to up their game.
Inevitable comparison to Ipad (Score:4, Interesting)
The obvious remark that someone could make is "spec don't matter, the ipad will prevail". This device is going to be the acid test of that theory. Here, finally, is a device at the same price point with unarguably more processor power and a bigger scree and more ports. It's running the first mature (in my opinion) android OS. Will this compete with the ipad when nothing else has?
What is also instructive is that the benches show that all the processor power is very helpful for graphics and math computing but relatively unimportant for many things people use tablets for like checking e-mail and surfing or watching a video. Other things like touch lag or seemless integration or simplicity of syncing are likely to be concerns. What buyers know is that if they buy an ipad they won't regret it. But they worry about the transformer. Will the processor spec overwhelm in interface concerns?
This will be very interesting to watch. it puts out a marker for both the tegra concept and a technical challenge for the ipad 3
Re:Touch lag (Score:2, Interesting)
Android OS applications are written in C++ and compiled directly to native code. Objective C is managed code and includes garbage collection.
Re:Must be love (Score:5, Interesting)
I get a different reaction when I tell people that my Iconia is not an ipad. Of course I do get the glazed over look like you describe from anyone who doesn't use such things, but the others don't refer to it as a knock off, more like "so... it's like an ipad... but better?"
I guess it's all how I describe it... It's like an ipad... except that I can pop in a micro SD card for more storage, I can plug in devices like hard drives, digital cameras, or USB keys to the full sized USB port, and I can watch my movies from it full screen on an HD TV thanks to the HDMI output. It has a higher res camera, and costs a fair amount less. Additionally I can load any app I want on it without having to "jailbreak" because it's android.
I've actually seen a look of jealousy from several iPad users when they see how I use the Iconia.
Best is when I'm working with someone who sees me use it at the desk hooked up to keyboard, mouse, and external 300GB USB hard drive, and then we get a call and I grab just the tablet portion and go. Suddenly everyone wants one.