[Asus  Eee Pad Transformer Prime] Blairware:
My thoughts

s, So I read this thread with strong interest because apart from Wifi that's GOOD if nowhere near great (Bandwidth & Throughput numbers at the far reaches of my useable home WiFi network are decidedly lackluster, compared to the 4 other WiFi devices I used to compare, this on a Cisco E4200 Router - one of the best for 2.4 throughput, which unfortunately we are stuck with. Why, with all the high end specs that Asus wanted for the prime did they NOT include a 5Ghz WiFi is disturbing (did they test it to find the range unacceptable... Makes one wonder, huh?)

But I digress. My WiFi streams NetFlix (with a Bluetooth Headset aat the farthest points I am likely to travel to at home, so I can easily live with that performance.

GPS.. Not so much. And I am sure most have noticed that either: a) There is a wide range of performance, as reported by users or b) Test conditions vary greatly from test to test and user to user, or c) Primes have GPS that works when it wants to, likewise fails when it wants.

My own results have been so inconsistent, that I wonder what to make of them. My first Prime got zero sats indoors. Nothing. Outside I would catch a few, but no locks. Then along come the OTA update on the 18-19th of January from Asus. I THINK this was the one that bumped GPS Firmware to 6.9.13, but I am not 100% on that. I only know tthat the one from early January, right after I got my Prime, when it was still Honeycomb and included a Camera update did Nada for me.

This update from 1/18 or so did an amazing thing. I got , right after flashing the FW, something like 11 sats., including locks (in use) on 4 or 5 and... get this. This was INDOORS!!! I was so happy, I was like "Baby.. I am good to go" The thrill was short lived, however. Further tests never got results like that, and the Prime went back to crappy or non-existent GPS.

Now I am on Prime #2. Supposedly opened and tested for WiFi, GPS, Screen Bleed etc. My Wifi is as reported above. GPS was once again worthless.. N sats indoors, and no sats OUTDOORS with a clear view in all directions of a clear (not cloudy) sky. MAJOR bummer.

I was not willing to RMA again, at least not so soon after getting the new one. Then, last week, after 4-5 unsuccessful attempts to get ANY type of GPS on this, I fired it up in the car, where there was no WiFi present and BOOM: Satellites all over the place... I was like: WTF??? Tried it again a few tomes, and though results were mixed, it got SOME sats in view.

Still not working at a useable level at that point, but my thought was, if it functions at all, even on a rudimentary level, I can wait and see if FW or changes to files like GPS.conf can help.

Oh. Then I got .13 and, as with every update got my hopes up... in this case? No change for better or worse. It didn't BREAK anything though, LOL!

The thing that makes me nuts is how variable it is. By which I mean that one minuteyou could see 12 sats, and be using 4. 10 seconds later, they are GONE. 10 seconds after THAT and a few show up... then a few more.. then poof! Gone again. The way they appear and then drop LOOKS like an interferance issue. It's not like you have weak, but steady performance. What I see is decent amounts of sats, decent strengths. Then nothing... what the heck is happening. Like the guy who had the back off and soldere a wire to the Pogo Pin... Nothing then he takes the wire and puts it on the desk... and it starts picking up again.

SO: My question remains: are there different hardware revisions out there? My opinion is yes. Especially when more that one Asus support MANAGER makes comments about "the new hardware" - Which I supposedly have on my C1 Serial number. If true, things get more dicey, since each update needs to work on multiple hardware revisions, which is not always realistic and often not possible. Whoops - there goes the OTA update ability, unless it is sophisticated enough to query hardware, and apply the right packages (not as difficult as you would think, but introduces many more opportunities for things to go wrong. Sigh.

AND, here is my news flash, or whatever you wat to call it or make of it: I had a high level ASUS Support Manager (NOT SALES, NOT CUSTOMER support, TECH support to be clear) tell me: "I can't tell you why there is signal dampening, but it is none of the things that are being claimed out there." I paraphrased that, but it is in a nutshell what he told me. This was during the first few days of February, when pogo pins were under discussion, but before all those lunatics started disassembling their Primes to see what they could figure out.

Does ANYone else have anything similar from ANYone at Asus, regarding GPS? I also know that if it were a "dead issue" as some have said, I don't think that Asus would keep issuing updates that mention GPS performance.

I'll bet even Asus had no idea how messy this was gonna get. If they didn't go around pounding their symbolic chest and hyping the **** out of the Prime, things would be a LOT calmer and they would not have all this pressure to perform. It's hard to be at the top, in the spotlight. But they wanted to be there... I just hope the pressure doesn't get to them too much more. They have made enough mistakes to last a WHILE, LOL!