ASUS Eee Pad Transformer - It's Morphing Time

Performance Benchmarks

Power Up 

You would have noticed that Honeycomb tablets these days usually have similar hardware specifications. The ASUS Eee Pad Transformer is no different from its Honeycomb peers, the Motorola Xoom and the Acer Iconia Tab A500. It comes with the NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core 1.0 GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. In this section, we pit the Transformer against the Motorola Xoom and Acer Iconia Tab A500 to see how it fares in the following benchmarks:

• Quadrant evaluates the CPU, memory, I/O and 3D graphics performance. This is an Android OS based test.
• Smartbench 2011 is a multi-core friendly benchmark application that includes both the Productivity and Games Indices for a more complete gauge of the overall performance of Android devices.
• SunSpider JavaScript benchmark measures the browsing performance of the tablet.

Do note that these benchmarks (and the upcoming battery tests) were conducted on an earlier Transformer unit that came with Android 3.0. This gives you a clearer and fairer understanding of how the ASUS tablet stands against similar Android 3.0 tablets that were tested earlier in the year.

Judging from the scores of the Quadrant and Smartbench benchmarks, the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer is consistent with the other Honeycomb tablets. It follows closely with the leader of the pack, Acer Iconia Tab A500 in most of the benchmarks. This is not surprising as all three tablets are equipped with the same hardware configurations.

From the SunSpider Javascript benchmark which measures the web browser performance, all three Android tablets scored almost similar results while the Apple iPad 2 falls behind a tad bit. Nevertheless, these are just numbers generated from benchmark tests conducted on the tablets with stock firmware. Therefore, they do not form a conclusive account of the performance during your day-to-day usage conditions.

During our time reviewing the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer, we felt that there was no significant differences between using it and other Honeycomb tablets. The user interface is generally smooth and fluid. Internet browsing was good, thanks to the Adobe Flash 10.3 support. We played several games such as Angry Birds and found the experience to be positive.