Asus Transformer Prime Tablet Review

Screen

At the center of the Asus Transformer Prime TF-201 is the Super IPS+ display, measuring in at 8.5625 x 5.325 inches and with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. Though it's the exact same size and resolution as many of the other leading Android tablets' screens, the Super IPS+ display allows for a greatly improved viewing angle, if you like to show people things on your tablet, or if it gathers a small crowd.

Indoor & Outdoor Use

Even though the tablet has a decent peak brightness, direct sunlight will still wash out the image of the Asus Transformer Prime TF-201 because LCD screens require their backlight to overpower the ambient light for their image to be seen. This fact, in conjunction with the proclivity of Gorilla Glass to reflect a lot of light makes the Asus Transformer Prime TF-201 less than ideal to take outdoors unless the weather is bad; in which case you shouldn't take the tablet outdoors anyways.

Legibility

Asus’ versatile tablet displays a crisp, legible picture on par with the other heavy hitters on the market at the moment, so you shouldn’t notice many resolution issues.

Reflectance

Much like other tablets with an LCD screen, the Asus Transformer Prime is extremely reflective. Not only is the reflection pattern sharp and annoying, but it will bounce about 13% of total light shone on the screen back at the viewer. This is about par for the course for tablets.

Screen Size & DPI

With an 8.625 × 5.325 inch screen with a resolution of 1280 × 800, the Asus Transformer Prime nets a dots-per-inch measure (DPI) of 150, which is about par for the course among high-end tablets. This is a screen that is the right size and resolution for the job, although some users prefer smaller screens. See if you can play around with this at a local store before buying to see if you would prefer this screen size.

Blacks And Whites

If you’re looking to max your settings, set the battery mode to “Normal” and crank the screen, you’ll be pleased to know that the Asus Transformer Prime is capable of blasting out around 600cd/m2, which is incredibly bright for a tablet. While it does suffer the drawback of having a very high black lavel, this can be corrected by dropping the screen brightness.

Color Gamut

Like most tablets, the Asus Transformer Prime seems to fall far short when its color performance is matched against the rec. 709 standard, but against other tablets, its about as good as you can expect. Reds and greens are undersaturated, and blues are shifted wildly towards cyan. The white point isn’t that far off of what it should be, but it does have a cyanish hue to it.

Battery Life

While the battery life results for the Asus Transformer Prime varying wildly, it’s tempting to think that either there’s something wrong with the tablet, or our testing methods, but after repeated tests, we can assure you that neither is the case. Rather, it’s a hardware issue. This is the first quad-core processor in a tablet that we’ve run across, and because the screen is also incredibly bright, you have two elements that are capable of drawing an enormous amount of power for a portable device.

Because each element has such a hugely variable amount of power draw for certain tasks, battery life will swing from really good when the process uses only a couple cores, or if the screen doesn’t need to be bright. Reading eBooks, for example, draws a lot of power because it takes a lot more juice to display a lot of bright white area on the screen at 600+cd/m² , which is why the eReader battery life is so preposterously low.