Notebook Hunter

While $747 isn’t the lowest price we’ve seen for the 10.1in ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF201 (32GB), the addition of a free 16GB microSDHC card still makes it one of the best deals we’ve seen so far on this brilliant tablet.  The finish, the performance and the portability all combine to make it the poster child of what an Android tablet is capable of.

It looks like a tiny Zenbook and feels just as solid, and while the keyboard is definitely on the small side it’s a worthy successor to the remarkably pleasant keyboard in the original Transformer. It’s definitely one of the sleekest tablets we’ve seen so far, even compared to the Apple iPad 2.

A quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor and 1GB of RAM gives this tablet really snappy performance with Android 4.0 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich). Out of the box it’ll run Android 3.2 (or Honeycomb), but you can upgrade it straight away via the integrated software updater. Physical connectivity is decent overall: you get an audio jack, a microSD card reader and a micro-HDMI port on the tablet, while on the keyboard dock there’s a full-sized USB 2.0 port and an SD card reader. It also has an integrated battery to extend the operational time. The onboard 32GB of flash storage is middle of the road for a tablet, but the included 16GB microSDHC gives you a lot more breathing room for media content.

The slightly diminished port choice (compared to the likes of the Acer Iconia Tab A510) is compensated by the great portability. It weighs only 586 grams by itself while the keyboard dock weighs 537 grams. Together that’s only slightly heavier than the ASUS Zenbook UX21E, an already outstandingly light notebook.

That bonus mentioned earlier is a 16GB Lexar High Speed Class 10 microSDHC card. It’ll work in the Prime’s microSD slot, and being Class 10 gives it a potential maximum transfer speed of 10MB per second.

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