Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime - First Look
Welcome to the first ever Ritchie's Room TV segment! Here we take a look at the new Transformer Prime from Asus. Read on below for lots more detail and images. — The Transformer Prime is easily the most hyped of all upcoming tablets.
Context & Ripple Effects
Asus has been building to this moment all year: the original Eee Pad Transformer shipped as its Android 3.0 tablet back in March 2011, and Jonney Shih used an October stage appearance to unveil the Prime as a 10-inch, 8.3mm-thick machine running NVIDIA's quad-core Tegra 3. Pre-orders opened on November 24 via BGR's report on the quad-core Transformer Prime going up for pre-order, and Engadget's syndicated pickup of this same story points to a December 8th release date drawn from the pre-order page.
Ritchie's Room's first-look segment is the earliest hands-on treatment in this coverage cycle, and it frames the Prime as 'easily the most hyped of all upcoming tablets' — meaning Asus enters launch week with expectation management, not awareness, as its problem.
First-order effects
- Buyers weighing a December 8th purchase now have independent hands-on footage to judge the hype against, right as the pre-order window from the November 24 pre-order opening converts into actual shipments.
- The Prime's launch puts Nvidia's Tegra 3 quad-core silicon into consumers' hands for the first time in a shipping tablet, making the chip's real-world performance the immediate review talking point rather than Asus's industrial design alone.
Second-order effects
- Every rival Android tablet maker now has to answer the quad-core question in its next refresh, since the Prime sets the spec floor reviewers will use — repeating the pattern where the March Transformer forced competitors to respond to a keyboard-dock form factor.
- Nvidia gains a flagship showcase device whose reception will shape which silicon other Android OEMs commit to for their 2012 tablet lineups.
Third-order effects
- If the Prime sells on spec leadership, the Android tablet market consolidates around an annual hardware-cadence race driven by Nvidia's chip roadmap — a structural contrast with Apple's integrated model that will define how Android tablets compete through 2012.
- Asus's Transformer line becomes the template for how a PC-era vendor leverages netbook heritage into the post-PC category, following the brand-building path the Eee PC started in 2007.
The trend: Android tablets are entering a spec-refresh arms race in which Asus and Nvidia's silicon roadmap set the pace rivals must match each cycle.