 Welcome to my unboxing of the Asus Transformer Pad TF-300. I know I'm a little bit late to the punch on this particular unboxing, but I think you guys will find that it is worth the wait because the TF-300 is pretty boss. So there's not a whole lot that Asus... This is not a new unit by the way guys. We're just going to pretend that it's new by making it look more new. See, there we go. Now it sort of looks like, you know, not like 18 five year olds all sort of were touching it. There we go. So there's not a whole lot that Asus says about the unit on the package. Powered by Nvidia Tegra. This is critical. HDMI, okay, cool, nothing, and very simplistic packaging. It shows the different back colors. So there's red, blue, and silver. And this one is apparently a blue one. So we'll verify that in a moment. So the Tegra part is key because the TF-300 basically is attempting to achieve almost the same performance as the Transformer Prime, which is the update to the original Transformer, which was with the Tegra 2 processor. However, it does so without some of the extra fluff that doesn't add performance. So the TF-300, for example, forgoes the metal back that had the same concentric circle pattern and instead replaces it with a plastic back. The end result, I don't know if you guys remember or if you watched my Transformer Prime unboxing and first look, but the end result is actually quite nice. I personally prefer tablets with a plastic back to those with a metal back for a couple of reasons. Number one is fingerprints. Fingerprints are pretty much impossible to remove from an aluminum backed device and a lot of the time they will stain over time. So the back of the device will just look grubby no matter what. And then number two is in terms of comfort. These, can you hear that? These circles are slightly ribbed. So what that means is when you're holding onto it with your fingers, and the cool thing about the circles is no matter where you're holding onto it, it'll always be exactly against the grain of your fingers. So you actually get a little bit of grip, a little bit of resistance to your fingers slipping from the plastic back. I personally prefer it. It does add a little bit of weight and it does add a touch of thickness, about a millimeter if I recall correctly, to the Transformer Prime spec. So you got like your Asus logo, your back mounted camera, you got your speaker going on here. Let's have a look at the overall sort of I.O. Here, let me just see if I can figure out how to turn it on. Give me a sec guys. So while we wait for it to build up a base charge, we might as well have a look at the outside of the unit. So we already showed the rear camera, so that's an 8 megapixel camera. Up here is the microphone pinhole and the power button and that's pretty much it for the top, so it's very clean looking. Moving around to the side, we've got a volume rocker switch, micro HDMI, micro SD as well as a hard reset button. So that's handy to have because even the best OS locks up once in a while and that's something that I've really felt is missing from other tablet products that exist. So here is our 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and that's it for this side. On the bottom, we find the power dot connector as well as a couple of clips for the optional keyboard accessories. So just like the previous generation TF 101 as well as the Prime, it has an optional keyboard that you can plug it into which gives you additional I.O., additional battery life as well as a full keyboard. So the last things that I missed so far were the front camera as well as the ambient light sensor. So that's going to give you access to things like automatic screen brightness and whatnot. That way it knows how bright everything is. I think that's pretty much it for the outside of the unit. So until it turns on, we're going to have to hold off for now. Alright guys, so we've got it booted up now. It only took about an hour to get enough of a charge. I think it was just because it was really dead because it was a demo unit and they had it running like right down to the very end. So it's got about a 50% charge after only about an hour of charging. So it's good to go. So the 1280x800 IPS screen is, you know, it's not quite the brilliance and vibrance of the one on the Prime. The Prime is an IPS plus screen whereas this is an IPS screen. However, it is still really good. So I'd say before you see any kind of an issue with brightness or color, I'm able to turn it to about here and then to about here. So that gives you some idea of the angle. If you're using your tablet from this angle, you are probably doing it wrong anyway. So that kind of thing is not that big of a concern for me. So it uses a slightly downgraded GPU but the same CPU as the Prime. So what that means is in terms of snappiness, responsiveness, the Tegra 3 processor in this one is going to give you that, well, you can clearly see that responsiveness, that response, that snap. Unfortunately, our Wi-Fi is down in the Tech Tips room right now so I'm not going to be able to show you guys that particular. Actually, give me a sec guys. For products like this, other than the build quality as well as, yeah, basically the build quality as well as the features, it comes down a lot of the time to included software as well. So they include a note taking software as well as a Polaris Office Suite as well as Asus' MyCloud. So MyCloud allows you to, oh, look at this, it's got a little introduction. What does MyCloud do? It allows you to carry around music videos and documents in the cloud so you don't actually have to physically store them on the device but you can still access them as long as you have an internet connection. So that gives you a ton of flexibility. It's available in 16 gig and 32 gig capacities which means you can store up to that much on the device itself. It's got a micro SD slot so you can store up to that much more again on the device itself plus you've got your cloud as a place to store things that, like documents for example, that you never know where you're going to need them from exactly and it's really handy to have them when you need them. So, right, let's do a little bit about Tegra 3 because I haven't talked about it for a while. So Tegra 3 uses 4 plus 1 CPU cores. So it has 4 performance CPU cores and then 1 low power CPU core. So when I'm doing nothing, when I'm sitting here like this, that low power CPU core is keeping the power consumption of the device at a bare minimum. So performance while I'm doing nothing might be less which is fine because it's not doing anything and as soon as I try to do something, as soon as I launch a demanding app, it will kick in as many of those other cores as much as is needed in order to give me the performance that I need on demand. Now while I did say that the Transformer, I forget what it is, I believe it's the something 30L, sorry, the GPU in here is slightly, the T30L is slightly less powerful than the one in the Transformer Prime, the T30. It is still about 30% faster than the Tegra 2 GPU. So you're still going to be able to run any games even with HDMI out to a TV or to a projector or whatever else you want. You're going to be able to run any games that you could run on your Tegra 2 device even smoother than what you can do on here. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Asus. Oh right, no, I forgot about their... Right, right, they completely re-engineered the sound solution on this one. So one of my complaints about most tablets is that the sound is tinny and awful. So they had their sound team work on their stereo solution which is two small speakers behind this one grill here that Asus claims is actually significantly better in terms of audio quality and accuracy compared to previous generation products. So that is pretty darn cool. So even though our WiFi is down, I decided to just tether my phone so that we can quickly show you guys the browsing and overall responsiveness of the machine. Now bear in mind, yes, the internet speed is not what it would be because not only are we running off of 3G but we're running off of terrible 3G because there's so much interference in the Tech Tips room that almost nothing... No, I'm going to come back, sorry. That almost nothing runs correctly in here when it comes to wireless. So I'm just going to put my phone here which gives me an additional two bars of reception and hopefully that will be what we need in order to get this to actually function here. So Asus, let's go to the Asus Global site. Yeah, that's right. Oh, look at that. So if you've used a Tegra 2 tablet, you guys know that that is a lot smoother. The Tegra 3 processor just blows away the Tegra 2 when it comes to responsiveness. I mean, just little things. You can tell almost immediately when you sit down and use a tablet how fast it is, how responsive it is, how usable it is. One of my personal favorite benchmarks is going to the YouTube non-mobile site, youtube.com, and then trying to read comments because it just destroys my iPad 2 as well as my Galaxy Tab 10.1. So where is it? Desktop site. So let's see how the Tegra 3 processor handles it. I can barely even scroll on a video and read comments. It's just brutal. Browser. So fast though. Remember guys, I'm running on 3G right now. I don't want it to be trying to load a video in the background. And oh yeah, I never even mentioned it, but this is Ice Cream Sandwich of course. So the latest Google OS. So you can see there's still a little bit of delay, but it's actually way, way better than Tegra 2. So Tegra 2, I'll like swipe and then I'll do like 3 steamboats and then it'll go for me. It can be very, very slow at times, especially if there's a lot of comments. So you can see even this one is dragging a little bit. So there you go. Blah, blah, blah. The zooming and all that stuff. Looks really good. Screen looks really sharp actually. That looks fantastic. I have it at full brightness right now as well. Oh, I missed. There we go. Screen accuracy feels pretty good as well. That's the first miss I've had in terms of clicking. So we're at at least sort of 95%, which is about all I really expect. Oh, someone wants a Linus unboxing. 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