 Welcome to a very exciting unboxing and first look. This is the iPad Transformer Prime and based on everything that I already know about this tablet I am extremely excited to have a look at it. So I've got a few other tablets here for me, with me, for comparison. So I've got the Asus Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, I've got the Asus Transformer Original and then I've also got an iPad 2 in its little snug case there which I'll take off for a closer comparison. Check this out. So the first thing I notice about the box is a nice foamy insert which is going to make sure that that screen doesn't get damaged in any way during transit. Very very high hopes for this tablet so let's check out the packaging here. Rumble is going to help us. So the first thing we find here are some of the outstanding benefits offered. Cool. So incredibly slim. Yes, this is the slimmest tablet yet. Ultra performance with the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad core and that's a bit of a misnomer because it actually has 5 cores, one of which is a low powered core for when the tablet is not really doing much. Silky smooth 3D gaming, HD video playing up to 1080p all on Google's user friendly and upgradable Android OS. It's funny they mention upgradable because it will be compatible with ice cream sandwich moving forward although it does come with honeycomb. Unrivaled visual acuity. So this Super IPS Plus panel actually is according to what I've heard so far even better than what was my previous favorite tablet panel which was the one, the PLS panel on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 so I'm very excited to check that out. Supreme sound. So Asus says they've put in improved audio performance. Okay, unlimited productivity with the dock which I'll be checking out later so there's the Transformer Prime dock. Just like the original Transformer you can add more battery life as well as a full QWERTY keypad and some additional IOs so that's pretty cool. Hey check this out. This doesn't come with like a cheesy microfiber cloth, it comes with an actual proper textured one that's gonna like, look at this, I actually bought one like this a number of years back. This looks like almost exactly the same as the one I bought way back when. Whatever, it's very similar. This is really really old and bratty and this one's new so you can clean off your tablet with that. It also comes with what appears to be the same charger that comes with the original Transformer so actually here I have it on hand so I might as well check it out. What do we got here? Ah, yeah. Asus, something or other, yep. Looks like the same thing and as you can see it's a potent cat toy which you shouldn't be playing with that. Alright, what else we got for accessories? I think that's pretty much it. So it's a fairly bare package. You got your cleaning cloth, you got your little instructional doodad, you got your charger and you've got what is obviously the most important piece, the actual ePad Transformer Prime. So let's check this out. First thing we want to do is take off this plastic sheeting so this already looks very familiar to me. This looks a lot like the ZenBook which is just a beautiful piece of computer hardware so I love the finish here. It's got kind of a concentric circle thing going on with like a brushed metal finish. Nice shiny Asus logo right in the middle there. Overall the machine is quite light compared to the original Transformer. That was one of the things that made me sort of less of a fan of the Transformer because in spite of the good form factor it really had some heft to it. This one is definitely significantly lighter. That's also one of the things that I don't like that much about the iPad too. It's a very very heavy device and for a tablet it becomes very relevant if you're going to be, yeah it's actually quite light. I don't think it's as light as the Galaxy Tab 10. Well maybe, hold on, wow this is really light even in spite of the fact that it has, feels a little heavier. I'm going to weigh them when I do my proper follow up on this on my NCIXcom channel but yeah, it feels quite light indeed. Very nice form factor. But yeah, okay sorry what I was saying. So yeah, when you're like laying in bed watching a movie or reading a book or whatever the weight becomes very very important. So what else we got on the back here? We have a flash and the 8 megapixel camera and then we've got one speaker on the Transformer Prime. This feels like a bit of a step backwards to me given that the original Transformer had two speakers, one on the right hand side and one on the left hand side on the edges there. But you know what, it doesn't bother me that much when I'm using the iPad 2 which only has one speaker as well so I guess I'll let it slide this time. Let's have a look at what we've got for I.O. on the device itself. There's your standard headphone jack. Up at the top we find a whole lot of nothing except a microphone. We've got our on off standby button. Our rocker switch for volume. That looks, hold on, is that, that looks like micro HDMI but I could be wrong. Give me a sec, I'll double check that for you guys and then oh, that could be a microphone as well. Interesting. Okay I don't know what that is either but this is definitely a micro SD slot which is awesome because that in my mind already makes the Transformer Prime aside from the price point because yes the Transformer Prime is more expensive than the original Transformer but instead of starting at a 16 gig model at $399 it starts at a 32 gig model at $499 which is fine because the Transformer when it launched was $499 for the 32 gig model anyway so now we see a 32 gig model and a 64 instead of a 16 and a 32. So let's actually turn this baby on. Oh yeah the dock down here at the bottom, sorry I wasn't quite done yet. Oh what are these? Oh you know what these are probably for, yeah these are for docking to the keyboard. The keyboard which actually acts not only as a keyboard but an extended battery I think I already mentioned that. So there's our serial number, here's our little plastic thingy, we don't have to leave that on we can get rid of that if we want. I would probably not keep that on the device. So it's booting up right now. So let's talk a little bit about the Tegra 3 processor. Oh yeah we've got our front webcam here as well, our front camera. So Tegra 3 processor, so it's a quad core CPU plus Nvidia has also significantly upgraded the GPU so it is substantially more powerful than the Tegra 2 which was pretty much the only processor that you found in most of the first generation tablets with Android honeycomb. So I mentioned that it's quad core but there's a fifth core. So your four cores are going to turn on or turn off or be clocked higher or clocked lower depending on the profiles you set, depending on the load that you're running and then there's an additional one core that can run just as a super low power state and all the other four ones are off. So that's why it's actually a five core processor. Nvidia has also significantly upgraded the GPU horsepower so CPU is better and more faster and there are more and the GPU is much more powerful. One thing that I've noticed right away about this guy, hold on I'm just going to key in the password to my SSID here. Okay there we go. One thing I've noticed about it right away is I don't know if you can see this in this light but I can see the touch screen interface a little bit. I can see the grid of dots. It's not that noticeable. It only really, you know what, it only really comes out if I catch the light that's up there on the ceiling and it shines directly off the tablet into my eyes. I can kind of see the dots around it but it's definitely not as noticeable as something like the Motorola Zoom or the Toshiba Thrive. Both of those have very, very noticeable touch screen overlays. So this is sort of what I would say is about middle of the road in terms of the visibility of it. I can see it a little bit. So let's just skip that. Let's get this booted up. I just want to check out the overall responsiveness of the unit. So one of the things that I've really heard said about the Transformer Prime is that all of the kind of nonsense slowness that's been associated with Android tablets is pretty much gone because here, I mean, come on, let's compare it to something like an iPad 2 where the user interface is so slick. I mean look at that. It just kind of seamlessly goes from, okay the AirVideo one is at the bottom left, oh boom, now it's at the bottom right. How did that happen? Holy cow. So it's a very, very smooth user interface experience and that's something that my expectation is that yes, throwing more CPU and GPU horsepower at the problem is a good way to address it and it definitely looks better. I mean look at this. You can see how quickly and how smoothly it transitions now but Ice Cream Sandwich is also supposed to address that in a very, very big way as well. So when you compare that to the Transformer, you see that leg? You see that? The first generation Android tablets really didn't feel, I mean I'd say the Galaxy Tab 10.1 was probably the slickest feeling out of all of them but they didn't really quite have that same feel as the Apple device and it looks like it was a combination of hardware and software. So now we finally got the hardware that's going to be a lot more competitive with the processor and the iPad 2. We've got a screen that looks very, very vibrant and let's actually go ahead and wow, look at that. So they've really increased the brightness of the screen compared to the Transformer. Looks like a very, very similar but slightly different sort of take on the desktop wallpaper that we were using on the original and yeah, so brightness is way up. Hard to evaluate color just based on sort of my initial impressions here. They have made some significant changes to the menu right here though. So we've got a bunch of different stuff including your eco mode, so turning on power saving mode, turning on balance mode, turning on normal speed mode. You can lock your orientation or not lock your orientation. Look how quickly the response is on this though. Compared to previous Android tablets where navigating through menus really feels like a bit of a chore. Wi-Fi on, Wi-Fi off. Let's see how quickly it can connect to my Wi-Fi. Is my browser working yet? That's nice. That's one of the things that I really like about the iPad 2 is that when you are in range of your wireless it's like boom, it's on, it's on. So let's go NCIX.com. See how quickly that loads up. I'm sitting right next to my hotspot so this should be pretty much a best case scenario. I'm on a broadband 50 so that's a 50 megabit per second internet plan. Go to the forum. Let's read the forums. Very, very nice to look at overall though. I mean look at the, okay I apologize because you guys aren't really going to be able to see this but the contrast between this black and this white is just outstanding. Like this looks like the deepest of deep blacks. It almost looks like part of the frame more than it looks like part of the screen. That is just amazing. So far I'm very impressed with the screen though. Scrolling is nice and quick. Let's see zooming because that's one of the things that I really felt was totally not the best experience with the first generation of Android tablets. So oh there's no internet connection. Let's get that addressed. Okay just a sec I'll be back guys. Okay so here's the transformer. I've got the same page loaded. So zooming in actually feels a little bit better than it used to. There was a recent system update. I wonder if that kind of addressed some of my concerns. But it's still not quite there with something like the iPad 2 which just feels so silky smooth when you're zooming around. I mean look at that. Okay so we're not quite there but that's more of like a software thing that hopefully will be addressed with Ice Cream Sandwich. Let's wrap this up with just like a general physical comparison. I just love this thing physically actually. Like I love it physically. No no I don't do that. It's a machine. It's just taboo still. You know give it another couple hundred years and maybe we'll be having a different conversation. So let's look at the overall format compared to the iPad 2. So I'm just going to lay this down on top of it. So the iPad 2 is still not a 16 by 10 screen which is horrible and needs to just die in a fire. Hopefully that's something Apple will address with their next tablet. So you can see we do have a significantly more wide screen screen which is great for watching your media content whether it's on YouTube or whether it's over network or you put your media files on here on a micro SD which iPad 2 doesn't have. Very frustrating because I do like the iPad. Oh let's talk about the glass. Right Gorilla Glass. So as some of you know I recently broke my iPad 2. So my screen is cracked all the way from here to here and then all the way from here over to here. It's pretty pretty wrecked which has made me fairly unhappy. So this uses Corning Wear Gorilla Glass which should make it about as scratch proof and break proof and everything proof as possible. So that's something to bear in mind guys that actually there's a great demo that Asus has on YouTube of the original transformer where they take keys and objects and try to scratch the glass and they show you the result at the end. So that's outstanding and that's something if you've ever had a tablet that's broken then hey it might be a factor for you. So let's have a look at the format compared to the original transformer which is pretty darn similar. Look at that. They've reduced the width a little bit which is really nice although it is a little bit more. Okay so let's call this the... Why don't we call this the length. So it's a little bit shorter lengthwise but it's a little bit wider. Okay. However the screen size is pretty much the same. So what they've done is they've lost some of this bezel space around here and then they've increased a little bit of the bezel space around the top. Let's check out the thickness. So thickness was one of the things where the original transformer really didn't stack up well against its competitors. So yeah the original transformer really didn't stack up that well thickness wise. You can see compared to the iPad 2 against the original transformer and then there's the transformer prime against the original transformer. So I'm going to go ahead and put the iPad 2 next to the transformer prime. So you can see the thickness... Oh that's really really close. Okay so Asus says it's the thinnest. I guess I'll have to take their word for it but these all look really really close to me. So here's the iPad 2, transformer prime, and Galaxy Tab 10.1. So yes this was HDMI over here so that's micro HDMI. So what Asus has done here is they've produced a tablet that this was my favorite Android Tegra 2 tablet, the Galaxy Tab 10.1. No secret I love the screen, love the form factor, love the weight. However no micro SD, no HDMI output, done. Like you lose the benefit of going with the Google platform in my personal opinion by removing those features because that's a huge selling point for me versus something like an iPad 2 where you have to have a like a weird dongle to do HDMI output or get a USB port or whatever the case may be. So the transformer prime takes that form factor, fits in a micro HDMI, fits in a micro SD slot, and is still very very lightweight. Great looking screen so far but I'm going to spend some more time with it hopefully in the next little bit. Great piece of glass and I think we've pretty much got a winner here folks so thanks for checking out my unboxing and first look at the transformer prime. Don't forget to subscribe to Alain's Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.