 Today's unboxing is going to be a tablet accessory, but probably the most compelling tablet accessory that has yet to exist. So no, I'm not talking about cute little carrying cases or jewel-encrusted, well, carrying cases. I mean, really that seems to be what most tablet accessories are these days, is carrying cases. No, this is the Transformer Prime, well, iPad Transformer Prime keyboard dock attachment. And this is the black or gray or whatever they want to call it. It's that color. It's not the other color. So that goes with the Transformer Prime that I have here. So you can see there's a couple of logos on here. We've got HDMI powered by Nvidia Tegra, Tegra 3, mind you, although that's not in the keyboard attachment itself. So what is the keyboard attachment itself? Well, it does a few things. One, it's a keyboard. Okay, so that part is fairly self-explanatory. There's the keyboard aspect of it. Two, it is like, remember those old docking stations that you used to get for old notebooks that had like additional expansion, like they'd have a parallel port for your printer and stuff like that? Well, this is kind of like that as well because it has additional I.O. including actually, you know what, we'll go through the additional I.O. later. And then last but not least, it also has an additional supplementary battery. So okay, what ASUS has to say is dock and charge the pad for up to 18 hours of battery life. That seems a little optimistic, especially based on what I've seen so far. But what it does do is once you plug it into your Transformer Prime, it does charge the Prime's battery off of the battery that is on the keyboard dock itself, which is very, very cool. So we get a touch pad, we get a keyboard, we get some additional I.O., and we get additional battery life. How can you go wrong? Well, there's one way to go wrong. No, unfortunately, your old keyboard dock is not compatible with the new Transformer and your new Transformer keyboard dock is not... No, I wonder. Is this going to work? No. Okay. So your new keyboard dock is not compatible with the old ASUS Transformer. So why don't we have a closer look at it? So you're going to see it's got a great finish to it. I mean, the Transformer Prime is just leagues ahead of the original Transformer in terms of the overall build quality. Check out the brushed metal finish here. Let's have a look at the keyboard layout itself, actually. So we've got correctly positioned shift keys, correctly positioned enter, long backspace, overall, no complaints. It's a chiclet style keyboard, very short travel distances on these keys, but that is to be expected because the last thing you want is high profile keys that are going to stand a chance of scratching your keypad or scratching your screen when you have the thing closed. The hinge looks like it's very high quality. You can see it's quite difficult for me to move it right now, but once the Transformer Prime is on there giving me additional leverage, it should be fine. Very solid metal construction though. So every part of the hinge should be very, very robust. There's the lock button. So oh yeah, I'm guessing that moves once I actually plug something into it. You can see the Transformer Prime's ASUS' proprietary docking connector right down there. You've also got a number of hotkeys. So instead of F keys, we've replaced all of those with just pure hotkeys so you don't actually have to hold down a function key in order to make it happen. So we've got your wireless Bluetooth, brightness up, brightness down, auto brightness. Is that really the internet button? Because that looks an awful lot like an Internet Explorer thing, but I'm sure they'd prefer you use Chrome. Full QWERTY keyboard and touchpad, easy file sharing with built-in. Ah, SD cards and USB. So I want to show you guys the improved I.O. So what do we got here? This is a U.S. Okay, whatever, it's labeled. That's a USB port. Right over here is a full-sized SD card slot. On the other side, we have... Oh, okay. Right, so that replaces the dock connector on the bottom of the Transformer Prime when it's plugged into the base station. So that's how you'll charge both the keyboard dock as well as the Transformer Prime once they're connected together. I want you guys to check out the bottom. I've put a couple fingerprints on it already, but you know how it is. So there's your brushed metal finish, even on the bottom of the device. So ASUS has really taken a page out of Apple's book when it comes to finishing every aspect of the device in as beautiful a way as possible rather than sort of what I would consider to be more like the traditional PC approach, which is to take the underside of things like a notebook and not really worry too much about them. So I'm just taking out these rubber inserts, and I'm gonna go ahead and plug the Transformer Prime into the docking station. So with the actual intended tablet, this should be far less difficult than it was when I was trying to do it with the wrong one. So you're just gonna make sure you have it lined up right. There it goes. It locks into place, and then all you gotta do is boot this bad boy up, and it should be detected in a pretty... Yeah, there we go. Docking connected. Use... You gotta be kidding me. Use instructions. Use keyboard to type words. Thank you Google and ASUS for that. So I just wanted to show you guys what the profile of the device is like. You know what? Actually, give me a sec. I'll be right back. So it occurs to me, I wanna show you guys the profile of the device compared to the older ASUS Transformer, which is right here. So you can see that even with the keyboard dock, the new Transformer isn't that much thicker than the old Transformer, which is very, very cool. ASUS has done a fantastic job with the Transformer Prime. Now you compare it to something like, this is a first generation Acer Aspire 1. Look how thin it is compared to a netbook. This netbook, with the battery it has, which is not a 6 cell battery, is only capable of about 2 hours of battery life, whereas the Transformer Prime is capable of well over 14 hours of battery life once you include the extra keyboard dock. The last thing I wanna compare it to, in terms of its size, once you put the keyboard on, is the iPad 2, just because it's kind of the de facto standard for tablet comparisons. I wanna make sure that I have it in there. So you guys have a clear idea. Oh, it's even more broken than it was before. Oh, what a bummer. That crack keeps spreading. I might have to get that glass replaced. So there is the profile compared to the iPad 2. So here we go. Transformer 1, iPad 2, Transformer Prime with Tegra 3, and the additional keyboard dock. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the keyboard dock and this beautiful little piece of machinery from Asus. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.