WHEN I did a lunchtime chat with fredericks this week on tech gifts for the holidays, EK in Fredericksburg asked if I had “any ideas for my husband who already has lots of techy stuff but would like more.”I told her the best advice when buying tech for a techie is probably to ask him or her what they want, unless they’ve been dropping pretty clear hints. If she gave her husband a phone or tablet that is considered stale by first-adopters, it’d be like giving him a suit from the 1920s or her an embarrassingly hideous pair of shoes.
However, if you’re the adventurous type, tech gifts don’t get much fresher and hotter than the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, which hits shelves at stores like Best Buy and GameStop on Dec. 19. It’d be a good idea to go to the store and pre-order, though. There’s been so much demand for the gorgeous, sleek and powerful new Android tablet with a detachable laptop keyboard that Amazon has stopped taking pre-orders, afraid there won’t be enough available to fill them by Christmas.
Because of its Asus Laptop Keyboard docking station and quad core, the Transformer Prime has been getting great reviews. The detachable keyboard and the quad-core processor give it the convenient cool of a tablet and the dock, and quad core provide the functionality of a laptop. That’s twice the cores in other tablets, meaning better battery life (10 hours as a stand-alone tablet and 18 with the dock attached) and more power.
The Transformer Prime is a good tablet for both business types and avid gamers, with its speed and eye-popping graphics.
Its spun metal design is a head-turner, and it’s extremely thin (8.3 mm) and light (1.3 pounds).
The 32-GB, Wi-Fi tablet portion alone sells for $499, and for an additional $149, you can buy the dock/keyboard with an additional battery and extra ports.
There have been other attempts to match up tablets and docks, but this is widely considered easily the best, although probably not quite as good as the iPad 2.
But hey, it’s new and sexy, and there will be a huge envy factor.
It currently runs the mediocre Honeycomb Android operating system but will be upgradable to the new Ice Cream Sandwich OS next year, which will make it more competitive, interface-wise, with the iPad.
For more laptop news, please visit this blog: http://www.yourkeyboard.info/
Taking pictures with a 10-inch tablet is awkward, but the Transformer Prime’s camera is first-rate, taking 8-megapixel photos and 1080p HD video.
So, EK, you might want to consider seeing if you can pick up a Transformer Prime at local stores on Dec. 19 and taking a shot–if your husband doesn’t already have an iPad 2. He can return it if he wants and then pick out his own present, but at least you’ll be on the cutting edge as a tech gift-giver.
