Tegra 3 is coming at last (Details + Transformer Prime)

Ah! Okay, and sorry for jumping on you.

The Transformer Prime will apparently ship with ICS, which is the reason it has been pushed back to a December launch.

No question that this is one promising tablet - if it reviews even half as good as it should given the specs (and the fact that it’s an upgrade on an already well-reviewed tablet), I think this will be the Android tablet I go for.

Now, release it already…

I’ve found the keyboard on my transformer to be much more than a gimmick. I probably use my transformer stand alone 80 % of the time and it is indeed a fantastic tablet with a superb screen in its own right. But the differentiating factor, and the reason I chose it, is that it also has the keyboard when I know I will need the extra battery life or that I will be typing a lot.

It has the best of both worlds.

Wendelius

Re ICS at launch: I saw an article saying that; but I also saw another article saying that the delay to December wouldn’t get ICS on it day one (but haven’t seen anything other than a December timeframe for ICS release on it), so I guess I’ll wait and see. Either way, they sound committed to upgrading it quickly.

Re keyboard: I think if I didn’t already have a light ntoebook, that’d be a bigger deal to me. But who knows, maybe I would end up using it. I can certainly see it for travel – the keyboard dock in that case basically doubles as a case, right? So case plus extended battery makes it worthwhile even if you don’t use the keyboard much.

And now they’re rumoring the Acer Iciona Tab 700/710, with 1920x1200 displays and that same Tegra 3 processor. Okay, that’s even awesomer, and now I sort of want to wait for that, except: Acer, really?

Wow, apparently they aren’t kidding about nobody owning these things. I figured at least somebody would pop up with “Hey, I’ve got an Acer Tab 500, they’re great/junk!”

Anyway, relevant news: NVidia is all, “Tegra 3 tablets will be $299 in mid-2012,” which… okay, maybe if they’re 7" tablets; but given that a Fire-class device should still be selling for like $250 right now without the Amazon subsidy, I can’t imagine that something like a Transformer Prime is going to be $299 in six months.

Meanwhile, after an unsourced report that hardware makers were getting out of the Android tablet business, Asus denies it, and apparently they’ve been selling 400K Transformers a month? Which is, y’know, not iPad numbers, but not nothing either.

Yeah. the Transformer has been doing pretty well. As I recall. it’s been the best-selling Android tablet so far, so if this enters at the right price point (as seems likely), and is as awesome as it sounds, it could potentially become the Samsung Galaxy S2 of the Android tablet space.

Although I’ve also seen rumors that Lenovo’s Tegra 3/ICS device is going to have a 1920x1200 screen. If Asus is stuck at 720p-ish and everyone else is at 1080p-ish, it’s obviously a lot less attractive.

I was really disappointed to hear that there would be no 3G on the launch model of the Transformer Prime (ASUS has said it may develop a 3G version in the future) - that was a deal-breaker for me. Now I’m wondering how long Samsung will take to release a quad-core Galaxy Tab…

I have an Acer Iconia Tab A500 and…yeah. Not great. But I don’t think it’s because the Acer itself is that bad, I just think Android has a long, long way to go in terms of software. It’s a clunky experience.

The tablet itself is fine, it’s just got a pretty meh screen, and when you compare it side by side with an iPad or iPad 2 it’s not even close in terms of responsiveness and polish.

I bought the Tab because it’s what Costco carried at the time and the Transformer (my first pick) was hard to come by.

Well, ICS is supposed to be vastly better than Honeycomb, so. And at any rate, for my purposes (reading comic books with Comic Rack) Android is the only option, and the question is all about the hardware.

And Honeycomb was supposed to be vastly superior to running Gingerbread and… The issue for me is that it still feels like each version is rough and crappy and the next version is supposed to fix it.

And at any rate, for my purposes (reading comic books with Comic Rack) Android is the only option, and the question is all about the hardware.

Hardware may be great, but I need a decent software infrastructure to support it. For what it’s worth, I don’t even turn on the Tab any more, it sits unused in a drawer because there really isn’t anything interesting to do with it. I think it might finally have a Netflix viewer for it – three months ago it definitely didn’t.

John Gruber shares your pessimism, but also my optimism.

Also, I think it’s clear that Honeycomb was a botch. It’s telling that Google, when they released their source for ICS, didn’t even put labels on the Honeycomb “release”, because they don’t ever want anyone releasing a Honeycomb device, ever. They know it was a rush job, and I think it’s probably best to just think of Honeycomb as an early ICS alpha.

Hardware may be great, but I need a decent software infrastructure to support it. For what it’s worth, I don’t even turn on the Tab any more, it sits unused in a drawer because there really isn’t anything interesting to do with it. I think it might finally have a Netflix viewer for it – three months ago it definitely didn’t.

Yes, Netflix exists. The most recent version of Netflix came out first for Android, with the iOS version released later, so it seems like Android is now Netflix’s lead platform, even.

And I totally agree about software – despite my gadgetphilia, I’ve never bought a tablet to this point, because I had no idea what I’d do with it; I already have a phone, a light laptop, and a Kindle, and that doesn’t leave much of a gap, you know? And so my entire and sole reason for looking to buy a tablet now is to read comic books on it, and it seems like the Comic Rack app is perfect for my purposes, and it’s Android-only.

(But it turns out that Logitech’s Squeezebox controller app is also designed to work well with tablets, and there is Netflix, and I imagine I’ll find some purposes for it after I get it, and it won’t literally be a $500 comic book reader.)

My iPad fits comfortably in the “I don’t want to bring my laptop to do (x).” I store reference manuals and the like on it, can write and do web-surfing. The place I’m contracting at frowns on personal laptops floating around (you can’t even get a non-company laptop on the network), but my iPad doesn’t raise any eyebrows. I use it as my notebook/task manager.

My Kindle is where I do most of my reading now. It’s easy to toss it my back pocket when I go to lunch and I love the e-ink display. Both devices sit in my bag.

I’m still on the fence about the Fire, though. I think I’d like the small size but most of my task-management stuff I use iOS apps so they sync to my iPhone.

If the niche between a phone and an ultralight laptop is small, the niche between a phone, a Kindle, and an iPad seems damn near minuscule…

The Kindle Fire, maybe (although its advantage is it’s a hardware Kindle as far as Amazon goes.

But the e-ink display on the Kindle is the draw for the one I have.

No, right, I’m saying given that you already have a phone, a Kindle, and an iPad, it doesn’t seem like there’d be much of a niche for a Fire.

Transformer Prime now available for preorder. $499, as rumored, and $149 for the dock. It ships with Honeycomb 3.2, but they’re slapping the “ICS Ready” verbiage all over it, so I’d expect an upgrade soonish. No release date.

I’d really love to get this but I would want to get the docking station as well. But $650 is a fair bit over my budget for a luxury item. Sigh. May have to sit out yet another tablet generation and see what comes down the pipe next year.

I bought the original shortly after it came out, and had planned on getting the dock eventually. (They were tough to find and were selling for well over MSRP.) I never got around to it. I still love mine. Even without the dock, it is a great product.