Even though Asus hasn’t delivered on its promise to ship the Tegra 3-based Transformer Prime by the end of the year, it looks that by the time they will launch it, other tablet makers will get to show their Tegra 3 tablets at CES, too. But before we get to CES next week, we already have some information on 2 of the competitors of Transformer Prime – an unnamed Toshiba tablet and the Acer Iconia A700.
The Toshiba tablet showed up in AnTuTu benchmark, revealing the Tegra 3 processor, with a clock speed of 1.4 Ghz per core. The results, however, are very similar to the Transformer Prime scores, so it probably has the exact same Tegra 3 chip, which actually has 1.4 Ghz for the first cores, and 1.3 Ghz for the other 3 main cores.
The Acer Iconia A700 will also have Tegra 3, and another feature that will set it above any current tablet and some future tablets, too, is that it will have a “Full HD” 1920×1200 resolution display. This should make the text on the displays crisper, and you’ll be able to watch Full HD videos at their native resolution.
However, you should also keep in mind that a resolution this high will have a big impact on the gaming performance of the tablet, and possibly even on the battery life of the device. Tegra 3 can “support” up to 2560×1600 resolutions, but that doesn’t mean everything will work just as fast as on a lower resolution.
The A700 is also said to have a 5 MP rear camera, micro-USB slots, micro-HDMI port, and weigh 650 grams, which is about 50 grams heavier than a Galaxy Tab 10.1. It looks like Acer still has a ways to go until they match the thinness and lightness of their competition’s devices. But part of the competitiveness is the price, too. So it remains to be seen how competitive it will be in regard to that. I expect the Full HD display to be pretty expensive, too. However, I would still count on a under $500 price.
If the tablets come out no less than 2 months from now, which I think will be the case, they will most likely come out with Android 4.0, but they will probably demo at CES with Honeycomb on them.