ASUS’ follow-up to the Eee Pad, the Transformer Prime, will hit stores in the US on December 19th, and will arrive two weeks earlier in Taiwan, the company has confirmed.
There’s been a lot of speculation to when the world’s first quad-core hybrid tablet would arrive – with many having it down as November 28th. That date has come and gone, with reports from Newegg more recently suggest that the tablet will go on sale on December 8th, with GameStop stocking the tablet on December 9th.
Netbook News has quoted an ASUS spokesman, who has revealed the first place to your hands on their new tablet will be Taiwan, with US stock arriving a week later ready for sale on the 8th December, which tallies with Newegg’s prediction.
However, the company has now confirmed to several publications that the Transformer Prime would be going on sale in North America on December 19th, though stock may be available exactly a week earlier through online outlets.
The ASUS Transformer Prime is expected to launch in the UK and Europe during January of next year, which, being based in the UK, we’re obviously not fans of!
The Transformer Prime was recently shown off by Nvidia, which demoed the performance of the tablet’s new Tegra 3 chip. This new hardware features four ARM-based processing cores along with a fifth, more power-efficient ‘companion core’. The tablet will also come with a gigabyte of RAM, and a choice of either 32GB or 64GB of on-board storage.
The new quad-core tablet, a successor to the Asus Eee Pad Transformer released in early summer, will be the fastest tablet available, coming with 1200×800 display, Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, 1 GB Ram, an 8 megapixel rear facing camera, capable of 1080p video capture, a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera and a microSD slot.
It will launch with Android 3.2 Honeycomb, with an optional update to 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich further down the line.
ASUS is looking to capitalise on its impressive performance with the orginal Eee Pad Transformer, which received rave reviews for both its functionality and price – with its successor now expected to reach stores in the US a week earlier the we thought this is good news for Asus in the run up to the lucrative Christmas period.
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