[Asus  Eee Pad Transformer Prime] FluidDynamic:
I just wanted to share my experiences with the ASUS Transformer Prime after 7 days of owning one...

So when the Prime was first announced, I immediately decided that was going to the first and only Android tablet I get.

It had the specs. It had the looks. It had the good initial reviews.

Then when the Prime was released in the US, the first rumblings started to come out that the Prime was not as perfect as it seemed.

I was determined not to pay too much attention to the issues that people were having and wait to get mine to make my own mind up.

So on 2nd Feb, bought my Prime. And the first 48 hours were great; the tab had excellent build quality, the OS was nippy and there was the added novelty of the keyboard dock.

Boredom set in; there are not a lot of Android tablet apps out there; the apps that were updated to work with ICS scaled up beautifully, but are still very limited. The few optimised apps I could find were just OK, not great.

Also really dumb things began to irk me within the OS; setting something as simple as wallpaper was hit and miss. Sometimes the display would refuse to show icons or widgets without a reboot.

Then the bottom segment of the display would glitch and flash.

Talking of Flash, once I installed Flash 11 on the Prime, the performance took a bit of a hit; the browser was sluggish and wouldn't render properly;

I also had issues with DLNA; the devices in my house (Xbox, PS3, iPhone, Mac) can all see the folders on my Buffalo NAS with no issues. The Prime refused to see anything but the Music folder.

Bad.

Then we had the hardware issues.

The issue with GPS is well known; no lock whatsoever indoors…Outside, 5 MINS to get a lock on ONE satellite.

I thought "meh, it's not like I'm gonna use it…"

- Wi-fi signal would drop even when I was close to the router and even on a clear channel

- Camera quality for an 8MP camera was not as good as the iPhone 4S

- Light bleed on the right side of the display was bad as well…

- Battery was lasting 6-8hrs max;

It was at this point, I started thinking: This has just cost me £500.

It was something that I had been looking forward for weeks, had saved and sacrificed for… and I'm disappointed with it…

£500 is a lot of money for a device with so many flaws; it felt like a beta product.

It also didn't help that ASUS decided to announce an upgraded model with a fix for the GPS issues and that will probably have a better QA process.

Software-wise, Android has momentum… but it's not there yet.

I wanted to use BBC iPlayer; there is no app for tablets available and you can't even use the website because it's not supported; it's the same with Sky Go.

Both of these services have fully functional iPad apps, by the way.

There just simply are not enough decent quality or killer apps for Android tablet at the moment. Specs mean nothing without content to take advantage of them.

In hindsight, it was probably too early for me to get an Android tablet. As much as I like to tinker, at the same time I need something that is functional and just works.

I returned the Prime today; gutted I had to, but there too many issues and niggles that would have prevented me from justifying spending £500 on something that's not ready for primetime (excuse the pun).