Asus Transformer Pad TF300 Sneak Preview

Late last week, just before Asus officially announced the Transformer Pad TF300 with a $379 price tag, I was able to get a quick preview of the baby brother of the Transformer Prime. While it may not look as sexy as the Prime, the combination of great hardware configuration and the really affordable price makes it a very attractive tablet in the market.

We’ve already shared with you why we loved the Transformer Prime so much but for those who don’t have the budget to shell out PhP 32,995 (US$ 772) for the combo tablet and dock, the Pad TF300 might convince you with its $379 starting price (estimated to be under Php25,000 in the Philippines, with the keyboard dock).

The folks from Asus Philippines gave us a really quick sneak preview of the Transformer Pad TF300. And since the Transformer Prime was also there for comparison, we noticed several differences between the two.

• The Transformer Pad TF300 is not as thin as the Transformer Prime. It’s not that a significant of a difference but once you come and look closer, you will notice that the tablet component is a bit thicker in the middle.
• Asus dropped the aluminum-magnesium body of the Transformer Prime and replace it with a solid polycarbonate material on the Transformer Pad TF300. I am told that because of the material replacement, this contributed to the thicker profile and a bit heavier gross weight. This in turn helped Asus fixed the problem on the weak WiFi and GPS signal that plagued the Transformer Prime.
• Asus dialed-down on a few features like the removal of the built-in flash for the rear camera and the use of a regular IPS LCD instead of the Super IPS+.
• Asus aso improved on the design of the keyboard dock. The trackpad is much better to use with the separated button and the keyboard area is deeper giving the individual keys more space and height.

A few more design changes were also made to make both Transformer tablets look different from each other. The majority of the hardware specs remained the same.

Asus Transformer Pad TF300 specs:

• 10.1″ IPS display @ 1280×800 pixels
• NVidia Tegra 3 T30L quad-core processor @ 1.2GHz
• 1GB RAM
• 16GB internal storage
• up to 32GB via microSD card
• WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
• Bluetooth 3.0
• 8MP autofocus rear camera, LED flash
• 1080p video recording & playback
• 2MP front-facing camera
• Asus SonicMaster technology
• Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

An Asus Philippines rep tells me that they are planning on selling the new Transformer Pad TF300 in a bundle (with the keyboard dock included) rather than separately just like how they did it with the first Transformer TF101.

Their target retail price (at least in the Philippines) is just under Php25,000 which includes the keyboard dock. We’ll soon finally find out once they release it in the country next month.

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