I recently purchased a TF300T Android tablet from ASUS. The TF300T is a lower cost alternative to the much adorned Transformer Prime TF101. Even though the Prime is the flagship tablet from ASUS and the TF300T is technically a model with lower specs, it has a very important advantage over the Prime; it was released over 5 months after the Prime. In that time, ASUS had time to listen to the people who bought the Prime and fixed many issues that were raised. The TF300T is similar to the Prime except it has no flash for the rear camera, a regular IPS panel instead of a super IPS display, and no gorilla glass (the TF300T has what ASUS calls “hardened” glass, whatever that means). The CPU and GPU are clocked 100 and 200MHz lower respectively, and the back of the TF300T is made of plastic instead of aluminium on the Prime. One main complaint with the Prime was that it was too thin. This caused it to cut into users’ hands after holding it for a long time. The sharp bevel on the edges also caused problems with the ports getting broken as they were very exposed, as well as the microSD card popping out as it was not perfectly flush with the edge. ASUS has attempted to remedy the problems in the TF300T by making the device slightly thicker and giving it a smoother bevel. The microSD card slot is now properly recessed and it is almost impossible to remove accidentally. The slipperiness of the Prime has been remedied by forming concentric rings into the back of the plastic which give it some resistance when you hold it in any orientation. There is a case/sleeve that ASUS makes for the TF300T however there doesn’t seem to be any Canadian retail store that carries it at the moment. The battery life of the TF300T is quite good, despite being slightly less than the Prime (by about half an hour). The unit charges and connects to the laptop dock using a proprietary 40-pin dock connector. One important thing to note that I was unaware of when I purchased the device is that it will NOT charge off a USB port or any other charger. The charger it comes with is basically a black version of Apple’s famous charger for all their iDevices. It follows the exact same design except that it is slightly larger. That would be due to the fact that it puts out two separate voltages: 5V at 2A and 15V at 1.2A. That’s a maximum of 18W of output power, which is higher than that of a standard charger such as Apple’s which only puts out 10W. This translates to a faster charge time. I have measured the power consumption of the charger and it does indeed use the full 18W for the majority of the charge and begins to taper off when the battery approaches capacity. Since the charger puts out standard 5V, you can use it to charge other devices so you only need to carry around one charger. The built in speaker was another thing that many people complained about on the Prime and I am happy to say that it now sounds excellent (for a tablet) on the TF300T. The TF300T runs Andriod 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich which is quite standard among tablets today. There were some issues with the Prime that regarded the access time of the internal memory and would cause some applications to bring up the not responding dialogue. The problems seem to have been remedied in the TF300T as I have not received the message (except when I was browsing with Chrome and had 10 tabs open at once, but that doesn’t count). The interface is quite responsive and the slightly lower clock speeds don’t seem to affect the overall performance of the device. You could always root your device and overclock it if you really wanted to. The Prime had a big issue with GPS reception and I can safely say that it no longer exists in the TF300T. I can get a GPS lock in about 15 seconds outside, and I can usually get one inside as well. According to many testers, the WiFi reception of the TF300T is much better than that of the Prime and  the antennas are harder to block.

I have to say that I am very impressed with the TF300T and it was everything that I had hoped it would be. You can’t really beat a 32GB tablet with ASUS quality and an NVIDIA Tegra 3 CPU for only $400. My only complaint other than the scarceness of cases would be that the TF300T doesn’t have a simple name like the “Prime”.