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Asus' Transformer 700-series unveiled, previewed
The much rumoured high-end version of Asus' Eee Pad Transformer Prime has just been unveiled by the company as CES, namely the Transformer 700-series, albeit only as a mock-up as yet. The big news here is a move up in screen resolution from 1280x800 to 1920x1200, something that appears to be a common feature about many of the tablets that are appearing at the show.
The much rumoured high-end version of Asus' Eee Pad Transformer Prime has just been unveiled by the company as CES, namely the Transformer 700-series, albeit only as a mock-up as yet. The big news here is a move up in screen resolution from 1280x800 to 1920x1200, something that appears to be a common feature about many of the tablets that are appearing at the show.
As you can see from the video, Asus has gone with a plainer design of the back of the tablet, although that plastic strip on the top should allow for vastly improved Wi-Fi and GPS signals. Asus has also fitted the 8Megapixel camera here and the front camera was given an upgrade to 2Megapixels. The rest of the chassis is still made from aluminium, although at least for the time being it doesn't feature any fancy brushed pattern. Apparently Asus has upgraded the audio though with a pair of its Sonic Master speakers around the back.
Connectivity is also quite similar to the Transformer Prime with a micro HDMI port, a micro SD card slot and a combo headset jack. According to The Verge, we're looking at a 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3 SoC as well as 32 or 64GB of internal storage, something that wasn't confirmed in the preview video by Asus.
The keyboard dock adds an additional USB 2.0 port and a full-size SD card slot, again the same as with the Transformer Prime. The secondary battery is still present in the keyboard dock, as you'd expect. The screen, as we mentioned has a resolution of 1920x1200 pixels and it's using an IPS+ panel with a brightness of 600 nits.
The Transformer 700-series isn't expected to arrive until sometime in Q2 at the earliest. It will of course arrive with Android 4.0 as standard and The Verge is tipping it to retail for around US$599 (S$777) and US$699 (S$907), that's about US$100 more than the current Transformer Prime. A steep price premium for what is pretty much the same hardware with a better screen and a hard to justify upgrade for anyone that's just got their hands on a Transformer Prime.
Source: Techinstyle, The Verge
