The Asus Transformer Prime is going to be one of the hottest tablets going on sale this holiday season, and it all starts on November 9th, when it’s supposed to start shipping, although you will probably be able to pre-order it a few days before.
That’s great news for people who couldn’t wait for it anymore. But there’s something that might not make everyone happy. The Transformer Prime will not come with Android 4.0, but with Android 3.2 instead (Honeycomb). We sort of expected this, because we know Google usually launches just one product with the latest version of Android, not 2 or more. But that’s a shame really, because they could’ve shown the unification of the phone and tablet operating systems, but launching both the Galaxy Nexus and the Transformer Prime in the same time, and it would’ve made a lot of people happy.
I guess they didn’t because they wanted it to be just a Google/Samsung event, and also because the Prime is using a different chip, the Tegra 3. That might’ve taken them longer to develop for both chips, but on the other hand, they already had Honeycomb work on Tegra 2, and Android 4.0 is just an improvement of that. In the same time, Tegra 3 shouldn’t be all that different from Tegra 2 from a driver point of view. I doubt they had to completely rewrite the driver for it.
Whatever the reason, we are not going to see any tablet launch with Android 4.0 directly this year. The good thing is that Asus promises to upgrade Prime by the end of the year, so that’s not too bad of a compromise either if you can wait a month or so more.
The tablet itself is worth to get it, because of its quad-core Tegra 3 chip, which no other tablet will be able to match for a while, with twice as fast browsing, and much better multi-tasking, all put into a very slick and slim aluminum body. Hopefully, they end up selling it with the keyboard dock together for only $500.