[Asus  Eee Pad Transformer Prime] BarryH_GEG:
There are a couple of things going on here...

1) For many (maybe even most) the attraction to the Prime is its Teg3 processor. Nvidia's been leaking vids of it kicking ass and taking names in all sorts of controlled test scenarios for at least six months. Because Teg3 is the first in a new generation of SoC, a lot of people are following the Prime whether they intend to buy it or not. So, expectations from owners, prospective owners, and watchers are high. From a performance perspective, I think everyone expected the added power of Teg3 to overcome some of the short comings of the OS. It appears it has greatly improved some things like video playback and gaming. Other things like UI fluidity, navigation, and browsing, perhaps not to the degree people expected. Most of the performance disappointments seem to come from those last areas. Nvidia really didn't talk about memory bandwidth and the GPU in Teg3, they focused on raw power. While both memory bandwidth and GPU are improved, the performance increase isn't as high over Teg2 as the raw processing power is. The smaller improvement in memory bandwidth and GPU, the limitations of Android, and Nvidia's hype have left people a little let down. I guess the important thing to take away is that, without question, the Prime is better than everything that preceded it. By looking at some incremental gains vs. high expectations fueled by Nvidia's PR I think no one can dispute at $499 with 32GB of memory the Prime is a success.

2) Speaking of $499, Asus buys the components used to produce the Prime from third parties just like everyone else. They're smaller than a lot of their competitors which logically means they pay a higher component price by dealing in less volume (total volume, not just tablet volume). Similarly their per unit cost for production and R&D is also higher. So there's two ways to look at the Prime. For an ultra-thin high-featured tablet at $499 it's an excellent value. But to provide all the features they did at a value price point some things had to be compromised. Two examples are the single audio speaker and 2.4GHz only Wi-Fi. So you can't commend Asus for providing all they do at $499 and then kick them in the ass because of the compromises made to achieve that price. The G-Tab 10.1 32GB with its Teg2 processor is still selling for $599. So when complaining about what the Prime does or doesn't do, ask yourself if those things are worth an extra $100 to you. And let's assume the Lenovo Teg3 with 32GB of memory sells for $599. The new question becomes is its higher res screen, additional RAM, and any other features worth the extra $100? Many of the heated discussions here about specs totally left out price. If the 32GB Lenovo is $499 then that's a whole different discussion (which we don't need to have now).

3) Let's talk about QC. I've owned a lot of devices and followed a lot of forums here. Before a device is actually released the posts in any given forum are 80% love and 20% skepticism. They're all based on expectations from leaked specs, manufacturer hype, and loyalty to that specific manufacturer. It's been said here a couple of times all devices have some issues when they're first released. Some are real and some are just missed expectations (which were never real in the first place). What happens next is interesting and can be compared to our dysfunctional Congress. If the number of issues and expectations missed are high, the balance of forum power shifts to the negative. If they're low and/or caught quickly the power shifts to the positive. And in both cases the higher power beats down the other and sets the tone for the forum. The tone here is negative. I think some of it's related to expectations but you really have to be an Asus loyalist to overlook both the commonality and quantity of some of the issues being reported by owners. And some will say "people with issues post and people without them don't." That's totally true but there's no reason this forum when compared to others should have a higher percentage of negative comments unless there were more issues and problems to report. The TF1 had issues and Asus recovered. Hopefully it'll be the same for the Prime. But to ignore the issues being reported or to label those reporting them as "haters" doesn't change the fact that Asus has some work to do on the Prime's h/w and s/w.

Peace out.