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Transformer prime bye! bye!

T

toondw

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 28, 2009
335
1
Northumberland, UK
Well, after 2 1/2 years of iPad and iPad 2 I got bored and jumped ship.

I got myself a transformer prime with keyboard (uk)

Well, it looks lovely, you turn it on and you are hit in the face with a beautiful screen and lots of "widgets" to customise the area, you feel "in charge".

However........

What it has in looks it fails in depth, the thing is laggy, the browser is appauling and so far certain applications even in built ones force the prime into a reset!

Now, I dumped the iPhone 4s for a galaxy nexus and love everything about that (using that typing this) but the transformer prime is not even a contender against the iPad never mind the iPad 2 or even more importantly the iPad 3! :banghead:

Its going back to amazon and I will keep the cash for the iPad 3.

Sorry iPad for my boredom, I promise to be a good boy from now on but can you just give me a little more customisation please with your stock from in future?

:rolleyes:
 
toondw said:
Now, I dumped the iPhone 4s for a galaxy nexus and love everything about that (using that typing this) but the transformer prime is not even a contender against the iPad never mind the iPad 2 or even more importantly the iPad 3! :banghead:
Click to expand...

Did a similar thing with the iPhone 4S myself.

From July 2011 last year I went through, Samsung Galaxy S2, Palm Pre 3, HTC Sensation, Blackbery Torch 9860, Bold 9900, HTZ Mozart, Samsung Focus, Nokia N9, Noika Lumia 800, and Galaxy Nexus....... I liked all the varying operating systems but the downfall even on the Android ones were for me Apps, and software updates (hate the way android phones rollout updates so some carriers don't bother putting out the update for weeks or at all). My galaxy nexus was also afflicted with the horrid auto volume bug (since patched) but it drove me mental and rendered the phone unusable for me in the period I should have been falling in love with it.

My other bugbear with all of them was that the software for syncing to a mac is a joke for most part. Windows Connector is the best of a bad bunch and Samsung Kies for Mac is just horrid, and the Blackberry Desktop Software has a terrible habit of letting the album artwork collector run in the background eating huge amounts of memory.

Of all the phones however, the bold 9900 had best call quality and reception.

MeeGo on the N9 is lovely but lack of apps, and the again rollout of updates is a nightmare, I was left waiting 6 weeks for the 1.1 update on my Swiss handset after its release. I prefer the way apple just rolls out an update and it's available to all there and then.


I've gone back to an iPhone 4S white 64gb, I like the way it just works, that there are many more apps and often cheaper than alternative marketplaces, and it plays nice with all my other apple equipment.

___


Likewise I also have bought a Nook Color and rooted, a HP touchpad and finally a Blackberry Playbook whilst on big sales to play around with, but they will never replace my iPad 2, the only thing capable of doing that will be the iPad 3.




Using other devices is good (if you can afford to do so), it makes you aware of the good and the bad of all the devices, but it also makes you appreciate something more when it is done well, or small things you may not have appreciated prior to using alternative devices.



My bugbear with all android phones and what has kept me away from Android tablets, is the fragmentation, the way google App store is managed - so much rouge broken crap in there, and sometimes despite google marketplace telling me an app is compatible, sometimes they clearly aren't and simply don't work at all or at worst bugger something else up. I had a live wallpaper once that crashed and caused my device to have to be factory reset, even after google said it was compatible.
 
I did that a few times, however never sold my ipad2, and the next 3 is in my sights.
 
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matttye said:
I'm seeing this similar story a lot.

Android has already surpassed the iPhone, but for tablets...it's not there yet.
Click to expand...

Surpassed the iPhone in what way?
 
Gav2k said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)



Surpassed the iPhone in what way?
Click to expand...

Don't be obtuse. Sales, features...

I love my iOS devices, but it's easy to admit that Android is the king of phones and has many more features in its OS.

Doesn't mean it's my preferred mobile OS though. :)
 
Dorkington said:
Don't be obtuse. Sales, features...

I love my iOS devices, but it's easy to admit that Android is the king of phones and has many more features in its OS.

Doesn't mean it's my preferred mobile OS though. :)
Click to expand...

Apples to oranges.

Android to iPhone is not valid.

Nexus to iPhone is.
iOS to Android is.

And iOS has sold more than a 100 million more than Android.

Jailbreak with Absinth and enjoy your customization features. ICS isn't as good as Engadget or Gizmodo were making it out to be - I've used a Galaxy Nexus before, and it felt like other Android phones - slow, laggy, and unfinished.
 
w00t951 said:
Apples to oranges.

Android to iPhone is not valid.

Nexus to iPhone is.
iOS to Android is.

And iOS has sold more than a 100 million more than Android.

Jailbreak with Absinth and enjoy your customization features. ICS isn't as good as Engadget or Gizmodo were making it out to be - I've used a Galaxy Nexus before, and it felt like other Android phones - slow, laggy, and unfinished.
Click to expand...

I totally agree. ICS is definitely the best so far (and one should hope so!) but when I ordered my Nexus I decided to return it shortly after. It's a great phone in its own right but it felt like a bit of a downgrade. I was using it and wondering why I should renew my contract for a phone that doesn't run as smoothly as my iPhone 4 (with all its hundreds of applications), out of the box.

And thank you for pointing out that Android vs iPhone isn't a valid comparison! :D
 
I had the iPad 1 WiFi and 3G. Sold them and got the T-Mobile G-Slate. In short, it was okay, but when typing on the screen keyboard keys that are close together, like G and H, don't sense well as you type. If you type, "Tonight" you're likely going to get "Tonigt", missing the H. If you type quickly, GHGHGHGH you'll notice the H is missing much of the time. In fact, any keys that are close together, when typing fast, one of them is missed.

So I bought a Galaxy Tab after first testing to make sure it had better keystroke sensing. And then I had to return it for a screen problem 3 times in a row. The Galaxy Tab I'm left with is sitting in closet in the box with the same screen problem again. It looks like there is an oil slick on it. Many people in the XDA forums have returned theirs a whopping 7 times. I gave up at 3 and kept the 4th one and simply bought the iPad 2.

I had a very similar experience with Android phones. When the iPhone 4 released I waited in line for hours on three separate occasions. I finally went into the Sprint store and bought the HTC EVO, which was pretty okay. I just didn't like Sense. I removed much of sense and that was fine for a while. Later I decided to get a Nexus. I got talked into buying the T-Mobile LG G2X. Which was pretty sharp at first. Within a week my music started to skip on playback. I couldn't go 5 seconds without hearing it skip. During my workouts this began to really bother me. So I paid $100 for a Class 10 MicroSD card hoping to solve the problem. Nope. Reception at my office was horrible. And the WiFi T-Mobile app that is supposed to allow you to make and receive calls over WiFi rarely worked. The phone started to reboot itself. Getting pretty angry I switched back to Sprint andy bought the Nexus S.

The Nexus S turned out to be the worst phone I've ever owned. The four buttons on the bottom have this nasty habit of locking you out of pressing them. They become dim, one is off and they stay that way for 30 seconds at a time locking you out of basically using the phone at all. I went to a Google forum to complain and found that this had been a known issue for the better part of a year!!! And google, update after update never solved it.

In the end, I walked into a Verizon store and asked, Do you have the 4S in stock? Yes, we do they said. Great, I want a white 32 GB one. Switch me now. And that was that.

Android is a nice idea. Looking back at it I have come to realize a few things. All the manufactures of Android handsets are more worried about releasing a new phone every three months than releasing a quality device they will stand behind. My G-Slate that's still in the closet is still on Android 3.1. The G2X is still on 2.3. The Nexus S is still on 2.3. The Galaxy Tab is on 3.2. None of these devices has the latest OS. None of them has ever got anything beyond a modest point update.

I could go on about the quality of software too but this is already long enough. Let me just say I honestly believe Android is for suckers. And I was suckered into it. By myself and friends. It's pure hype. Look at the face of the phone and see how nice it looks. Yeah, that's great and all but there is more to these devices than the first impression you get by looking at the phone. Nothing has even come close to the all around well managed experience you get with iOS.
 
I'm getting ready to put cynogenmod 9 onto my touchpad, so I can dual boot into either ICS or WebOS on it. Going in, I know that this isn't even a beta build of the software, it's still an Alpha code, but to be honest, it'll probably run as good as ICS on a device built for Android.

The nice thing is, the cynogenmod's update the software and I will eventually have a quality tablet with two OS's on it, that only cost me $150 for a 32gb tablet that rivals the ipad 1.
 
sfoalex said:
I had the iPad 1 WiFi and 3G. Sold them and got the T-Mobile G-Slate. In short, it was okay, but when typing on the screen keyboard keys that are close together, like G and H, don't sense well as you type. If you type, "Tonight" you're likely going to get "Tonigt", missing the H. If you type quickly, GHGHGHGH you'll notice the H is missing much of the time. In fact, any keys that are close together, when typing fast, one of them is missed.

So I bought a Galaxy Tab after first testing to make sure it had better keystroke sensing. And then I had to return it for a screen problem 3 times in a row. The Galaxy Tab I'm left with is sitting in closet in the box with the same screen problem again. It looks like there is an oil slick on it. Many people in the XDA forums have returned theirs a whopping 7 times. I gave up at 3 and kept the 4th one and simply bought the iPad 2.

I had a very similar experience with Android phones. When the iPhone 4 released I waited in line for hours on three separate occasions. I finally went into the Sprint store and bought the HTC EVO, which was pretty okay. I just didn't like Sense. I removed much of sense and that was fine for a while. Later I decided to get a Nexus. I got talked into buying the T-Mobile LG G2X. Which was pretty sharp at first. Within a week my music started to skip on playback. I couldn't go 5 seconds without hearing it skip. During my workouts this began to really bother me. So I paid $100 for a Class 10 MicroSD card hoping to solve the problem. Nope. Reception at my office was horrible. And the WiFi T-Mobile app that is supposed to allow you to make and receive calls over WiFi rarely worked. The phone started to reboot itself. Getting pretty angry I switched back to Sprint andy bought the Nexus S.

The Nexus S turned out to be the worst phone I've ever owned. The four buttons on the bottom have this nasty habit of locking you out of pressing them. They become dim, one is off and they stay that way for 30 seconds at a time locking you out of basically using the phone at all. I went to a Google forum to complain and found that this had been a known issue for the better part of a year!!! And google, update after update never solved it.

In the end, I walked into a Verizon store and asked, Do

Android is a nice idea. Looking back at it I have come to realize a few things. All the manufactures of Android handsets are more worried about releasing a new phone every three months than releasing a quality device they will stand behind. My G-Slate that's still in the closet is still on Android 3.1. The G2X is still on 2.3. The Nexus S is still on 2.3. The Galaxy Tab is on 3.2. None of these devices has the latest OS. None of them has ever got anything beyond a modest point update.

I could go on about the quality of software too but this is already long enough. Let me just say I honestly believe Android is for suckers. And I was suckered into it. By myself and friends. It's pure hype. Look at the face of the phone and see how nice it looks. Yeah, that's great and all but there is more to these devices than the first impression you get by looking at the phone. Nothing has even come close to the all around well managed experience you get with iOS.
Click to expand...
exactly what happened to me and this was the exact same conclusion I came up with. it costed me $400 but at least now I know to to ever go the android way.
 
i had similar experience as the op....I had the Asus transformer prime for a week.

I went in thinking it would be awesome having the best of both worlds. I already had the ipad 2 so i decided it would be neat to have the prime for something different. I already have a lot of experience with both Operating systems, owned original iphone, iphone 4, 4s, ipad2, nexus one, galaxy s2, and now transformer prime.

Ill start off saying android is nice to look, but once that initial awe wears off you realize that android still can't match up to ios, well atleast in the tablet market. Hardware wise the the prime had it all to be the best, but asus failed big time. Screen bleed problems, non responsive gps, weak wifi, ics update fiasco. I personally went through two primes before i returned them both. Both of them had gps, wifi problems, light bleed, but the first one had a graphical glitch after the ics update. i fixed the graphical glitch, by rooting and using the set cpu app. Then applied the hulu hack, which allowed websites to think the prime was a windows machine. This was awesome at first but realized that this was all possible with apps on the ipad (apps not available on android) which was a lot smoother than watching videos in the ics browser using flash. The native stock browser froze a lot, and crashed often. When it came to games android still has a long way to go compared to ios mainly due to fragmentation. The customization is nice and being open source is nice, but when the lack of smoothness especially when you have all that horsepower the awe wears off quick. I just feel like you can do what ever you can on android on ios with ease.

I really wanted to two tablets but i couldnt justify the prime, it would probably just sit there as i preferred the ipad 2. Also the worst was asus announcing a upgraded version of the prime with a 1080p, and better backplate to fix all the issues with the current model at ces. How do you do that to your customers.

Despite apples lack of customization, and closed platform, there is a reason they do this. There stuff just works (cliche i know i i know). That's the benefit of making software for your own hardware, everything is just unified.

well anyways cant wait for the ipad 3, and maybe dip my toes back into android when samsung releases a new tablet or when asus releases that 7inch $250 tegra tablet. Good times ahead.
 
toondw, never make selling/purchasing decisions based on boredom/inpulse.

The full breadth of apps, and the quality (not just icons/UI - but the full content and use of those apsp) should've been enough to entice you.

After swinging back & forth for almost 1.5yrs (3GS & BB 9700/9780/9900) - BB from what I know and troubleshoot on BES - I've finally decided that iOS offers me the BEST performance, reliability, compatibility with my lifestyle, future needs and desire to.

Although I've used smartphones before: BB, WM Professional 6.5/Standard, S60/UIQ, I never was an application hog. Even if you are I'm SURE that there is a plethora of apps in various categories that can help you grow or aid your life.

PS: if you're bored of the apps then might I suggest going into new fields you've NEVER considered before by looking up interests in iTunes U?!

:apple:
 
Android tablets are still not ready for prime time, which saddens me because I really like Android on my Gnex as well and I need file system access on my tablet to make it a true laptop replacement. It's a chicken and egg situation, developers won't produce tablet apps due to poor sales, but vendors can't move many units with iPad having 10 to 1 app advantage. I was thinking about getting the Prime since I sold my iPad 2, but apparently it has a ton of issues especially after ICS update so I'm holding off for the iPad 3.
 
sfoalex said:
All the manufactures of Android handsets are more worried about releasing a new phone every three months than releasing a quality device they will stand behind.
Click to expand...
And this is one of the reasons why I've become dillusioned with Android. It's turned into more of a numbers game. I'd prefer to have my choice of only a few quality devices that will definitely get updates for a few years (like iOS and WinMo devices) instead of having this over-saturated market of Android devices that more than likely, won't receive timely updates.

It's worth noting that I having noting against people who like Android. This is just my two cents.
 
I have an Android phone and have NO plans on getting an iPhone whatsoever, though I prefer Apple when it comes to the tablet game. Seriously though, Android has so many more phones in customers hands than iPhone does, a big part of that is because there are more Android handsets out there, much like what happened with Windows when they began putting the OS on almost every computer made. It's just the nature of the beast and the same thing will happen when enough tablets have Android running on them, eventually the iPad will take a back seat in sales because 1 device cannot, and has hardly ever, been able to compete with a slew of devices running opposing software. I'm just so sick of the Android vs iOS debate, they both offer great features and usability, who cares if Android is #1 or if iOS is this, that, or the other thing. No big deal.
 
Mac.World said:
I'm getting ready to put cynogenmod 9 onto my touchpad, so I can dual boot into either ICS or WebOS on it. Going in, I know that this isn't even a beta build of the software, it's still an Alpha code, but to be honest, it'll probably run as good as ICS on a device built for Android.

The nice thing is, the cynogenmod's update the software and I will eventually have a quality tablet with two OS's on it, that only cost me $150 for a 32gb tablet that rivals the ipad 1.
Click to expand...

have you used cm7 on both the touchpad and a high end native android device such as a sgs2? they are not even comparable in stability and speed. so an alpha build on the touchpad will definitely not be as good as a device with native ICS.
 
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