A little over a year ago, at CES 2011, ASUS announced an Android tablet called the Transformer. What made it special was that you could dock it into a keyboard and essentially use it as a laptop. The first Transformer hit the Asian market in March, and one month later it showed up in both Europe and America. It had the model number TF101. Several months later, in November, ASUS announced the successor: the Transformer Prime. Same idea as the older model, but now with a much better industrial design and quad core NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip. It started shipping during the last few weeks of December, but ASUS has had trouble ramping up due to customer complaints about poor WiFi performance. That device had the model number TF201. Now there’s a new ASUS tablet floating around in Taiwan with the model number TF300. What exactly is it? We’ve already heard about the TF700, which is nothing more than the Transformer Prime, but with an ultra high resolution screen, so is the TF300 a midrange device?
We don’t have any more information to offer you guys, sadly, but we wouldn’t be surprised if ASUS officially announced this thing later this month at Mobile World Congress. It’ll likely run Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box, and it might also have embedded cellular connectivity. That’s one thing that the Transformer Prime doesn’t offer. If ASUS is smart enough to put a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor in this thing. That’ll give it not only quad core like performance out of a dual core solution, but also a 4G LTE modem so it can be sold in the North American market.
What do you think: Have Android tablets matured to the point where we should be calling them “good enough”, or are you still telling friends and family to buy an iPad?