The Sad Story of Asus Transformer Prime Tablet

Bangalore: Asus launched its Transformer Prime Android Tablet on December 19, 2011. This tablet was the first one to have a quad-core processor with an Nvidia Tegra 3 and a mobile Keyboard dock and was supposed to defeat Apple’s iPad in the market. But the tablet lost the war even though it was given a lot of hype before its launch through Facebook and other leaked online sources.

Along with its quad-core processor and mobile keyboard dock the tablet had many good features like a 4 CPU cores and 12 GPU cores, a thin body of only 8.3mm, a Super IPS+ screen with a Corning Gorilla Glass protection, an 8.0MP back-facing camera with auto-focus & LED flash, a 1GB RAM with 32GB/64GB storage options and a Android Honeycomb OS.

After the launch of Transformer Prime a bunch of things went wrong which illustrated its downfall; Asus failed to deliver the product on time to the retailer which made them cancel their orders, Asus locked down the Prime’s bootloader of the tablet which caused disappointment and irritation in customers because they can’t access the full potential of the tablet now, complaints raised with its GPS function & Wi-Fi support and many other software and hardware bugs where reported.

Asus is still trying to make its Transformer Prime survive a bit more by releasing a bootloader unlocking tool, promising an upgradation with Android Ice Cream Sandwich, updating the metallic case which was blamed to cause the problems with GPS and Wi-Fi support. These efforts will bring a favorable response for sure, but the damage done can’t be reversed. Asus learned a lot from its mistakes and we believe all other players who are coming up high performing Android tablets in the near future will not repeat the same.

Asus Transformer Prime comes in two variants; 32GB model costs 25,000 and the 64GB model costs 30,000 and an extra 7,500 for its mobile dock.