My wife recently switched employers and is now a teacher at a nearby university. She’s practiced her line of work for the past six or so years and has done an amazing job honing her skills. She now hopes to pass her skills and techniques on to fellow students of massage therapy. Until just a couple days ago when she landed the job, my wife and I shared a single laptop (a MacBook Pro). She would use it during the day when I was off at work and I would use it during the evenings at home. Now that she needs her own laptop full-time (she’ll be teaching in the evenings), I needed a new rig. I opted to go with an Android Tablet since my employer loves it when I give presentations.

Tasty Ice Cream Sandwiches As all of you know, I’m such a big fan of Android, you could call me a fanboy (and I recently converted my wife to Android!). The version of Android 4.0 has been slightly modified by ASUS. The changes aren’t really noticeable and come more in the form of extra widgets and programs. ASUS did a really great job at keeping with AOSP UI as much as possible. I was surprised to find out that attaching my 2TB external NTFS into the tablet through the keyboard dock worked. I was able to copy 4GB of Defcon and HOPE presentations.

Hardware The size and weight of the Transformer Prime (10.1-inch screen) are great. I did have trouble finding the power button, mistaking the volume rocker for the power button. I guess I should have scanned the user manual before attempting to power on the device. The tablet didn’t come fully, or even partially, charged. I was in a slight pinch in that I had a two-hour meeting in which I would’ve loved to use the tablet. I had to wait for around 30 minutes for it to have enough of a charge to even turn on.

The display is great. However, the screen does glitch every now and then. The glitch is so infrequent that it’s not a problem; but when it happens, you notice. There are times when the display gets a little pixelated. In the Google Docs app, for example, the fonts aren’t that smooth and you can see some pixelation.

Performance Packed with the quadcore NVIDIA Tegra 3 chipset, this tablet does an amazing job with performance. ASUS has three profiles to choose from: power-saving, balanced, and performance modes. Performance is great in each of the three modes. When I’m using ConnectBot to ssh into my dev box, I switch to the power-saving mode and have no issues. When watching Netflix, I switch to the performance mode.

Conclusion I love this tablet and can already see that it can replace my MacBook Pro. I only say that because I have a server at home that fills the gaps created by switching to a tablet. I can’t do virtualization and development right on the tablet, so I need the help of dedicated servers that host VMs. If you’re a geek like me and don’t have that option, then using a tablet as your daily driver isn’t for you.