I received my Transformer Prime this morning. I don’t know if I’m way behind most people that pre-ordered their’s or if it’s on par with the group, but I’ve been reading about many people that have had their’s for a week now. Believe it or not, Canada Post actually delivered it to my door, unlike most online purchases I’ve received from BestBuy, which normally are dropped at the wrong post office after lieing about attempted deliveries.
It came well packaged like many higher end electronics these days, somewhat trying to emulate Apple product boxing. But unlike most high end electronics these days (like an Apple product) the battery was 100% dead. No charge at all. When was the last time you purchased a higher priced electronic device with an internal battery and was not able to power the device up? I did a little research online and found I’m not alone. Some people are claiming to have returned them since they felt it was faulty.
When you first plug it in and attempt to turn it on, it will flash a dead battery symbol incredibly briefly, then appear to be dead, except for the smallest indicator light in the end of the on switch. And indicator pin light that is difficult to see or find. No documentation warns you about this issue other than saying you should charge it for 8 hours before using to allow best long term battery life.
After 5% charge you are able to turn it on and play with it some while it charges, but not do any pending firmware updates. It requires a 15% charge before it will allow you to do the updates. There were several updates immediately downloaded and requesting install, one being for the camera and 3 others related to firmware. One large firmware update caused repeated desktop launcher app Force Closes after it rebooted the device until I manually rebooted it again.
The buttons are very flush but useable and unmarked, you may need to refer to the manual once to get a run down on what edge button is what. I thought the volume button was the on switch till I check the manual, since the device was completely dead experimenting was useless.
The battery seems to be sealed internally and not user serviceable.
The only 2 ports is a micro-HDMI port and a proprietary port for the USB and charging cable. I’m not happy or impressed with this. I was expecting and hoping for a standard micro-USB port. But one reason might be due to using this port for both USB, keyboard dock and for charging with a non-standard 15 volt DC supply. A standard USB port is 5 volt DC. The port is similar in size and shape to the Apple proprietary port, but obviously not the same or compatible.
It was fully charged at some point less than the suggested 8 hours, at what point I’m not sure since I didn’t watch it the whole time.
The graphics and game play of the demo games Riptide and Glowball are quite impressive, I immediately purchased the full version of Riptide.
That’s the extent of my review so far, more comments and pics to follow.
What’s in the box: