Tablet Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700T

Content

Differences Transformer Pad Infinity TF700T from its predecessor Transformer Prime

Display

Yes, he’s awe­some! A Super IPS + matrix, and even a res­o­lu­tion of 1920 by 1200 pix­els — such a “hell­ish” com­bi­na­tion will impress few peo­ple. How­ev­er, such a high res­o­lu­tion has a cou­ple of dis­ad­van­tages:

1. The dis­play con­sumes more pow­er, which affects the bat­tery life of the tablet.
   2.25 times more dots (against a matrix with a res­o­lu­tion of 1280x800) increas­es the load on the proces­sor and graph­ics accel­er­a­tor. This also leads to a decrease in bat­tery life, as the proces­sor often has to work with a larg­er load and at max­i­mum fre­quen­cy.
2. In addi­tion, there is anoth­er draw­back, which, over time, will have to “remove itself”: the incor­rect oper­a­tion of a very large num­ber of appli­ca­tions on tablets with such a high res­o­lu­tion.

Processor, memory

Trans­former Pad Infin­i­ty, with­out a 3G mod­ule, is equipped with an NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip. How­ev­er, there is a sig­nif­i­cant nuance: unlike Trans­former Prime, the chip oper­ates at high­er fre­quen­cies — up to 1.6 GHz, while in Prime the max­i­mum fre­quen­cy is low­er at 0.3 GHz. The dif­fer­ence, although small, is still sig­nif­i­cant. But even rais­ing the fre­quen­cy can­not com­pen­sate for the great­ly increased load due to the high res­o­lu­tion of the dis­play — the tablet often freezes, and in gen­er­al it does not work as smooth­ly as the TF201 Prime. That’s the price you pay for a great dis­play.

The Trans­former Pad Infin­i­ty mod­i­fi­ca­tion with a 3G mod­ule is sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent (in fact, it is a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent tablet), as it has a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent plat­form: instead of the NVIDIA Tegra 3 chip, these tablets will be equipped with a dual-core proces­sor from Qual­comm — MSM8260A.

Thanks to the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy (both low­er man­u­fac­tur­ing process and more mod­ern archi­tec­ture), this dual-core can com­pete in per­for­mance with four Tegra 3 cores while con­sum­ing less pow­er. We will be able to com­pare these two very dif­fer­ent mod­i­fi­ca­tions of the Trans­former Pad Infin­i­ty tablets in more detail only lat­er, when the mod­el with 3G goes on sale.

RAM has changed in qual­i­ty — now it is DDR3. Quite a bit faster and more eco­nom­i­cal than DDR2, which is installed in Prime. The vol­ume is the same — 1 giga­byte. I would like to see in the top class, which includes tablets of the Infin­i­ty series, 2 GB of RAM!

Communication capabilities, GPS

And here the tablet in ques­tion is very dif­fer­ent from its pre­de­ces­sor in the face of Prime. No, not because the Blue­tooth mod­ule is now ver­sion 3.0 (this is a tri­fle). The dif­fer­ence is that Infin­i­ty is spared from Prime’s huge draw­back — poor recep­tion of sig­nals from GPS satel­lites and an extreme­ly small work­ing dis­tance of the Wi-Fi mod­ule. If you are not in the know, then we recall: the all-met­al rear pan­el of the Asus Trans­former Prime sim­ply shield­ed the anten­nas inside the tablet, which had an extreme­ly neg­a­tive impact on the oper­a­tion of GPS and Wi-Fi. This gross engi­neer­ing mis­cal­cu­la­tion is cor­rect­ed in the Infin­i­ty series: the design of the tablet remains the same, except for the addi­tion of a strip of plas­tic on the rear pan­el, which gave “free­dom to radio waves”.

Cameras, sound

Both cam­eras have changed, and for the bet­ter:

The front cam­era has got a large num­ber of megapix­els — 2 ver­sus 1.2 for Prime. The qual­i­ty has increased not so pro­por­tion­ate­ly, but for video con­fer­enc­ing it is quite enough.

The rear cam­era has become even more aper­ture (f2. 2 vs. f2. 4 for Prime), and the lens has changed (yes, yes, it is here, how could it be with­out it! just ma-a-scar­let. :)). By the way, exact­ly the same cam­era mod­ule is installed in the cheap­er Asus tablet — Trans­former Pad 300. The pho­to qual­i­ty is one of the best among all Android tablets.

The audio sub­sys­tem remains the same. It is note­wor­thy that on the offi­cial web­site of Asus, the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the Trans­former Prime indi­cate “stereo speak­ers”, while for the Trans­former Pad Infin­i­ty — “speak­er”. The sound qual­i­ty can be esti­mat­ed at 4 and it is the same as that of Prime, and, accord­ing­ly, there are still two speak­ers — they are sim­ply locat­ed next to each oth­er, and, as such, the stereo effect does not work. In the descrip­tion of Infin­i­ty, the over­sight of the descrip­tion of Prime was cor­rect­ed.

Battery life

Just like Prime, Infin­i­ty is equipped with a bat­tery with a very impres­sive capac­i­ty: 25 Wh. But the bat­tery life is dif­fer­ent, and this dif­fer­ence is the more sig­nif­i­cant, the greater the load on the tablet. If we com­pare the bat­tery life dur­ing cyclic play­back of an HD movie, while the dis­play bright­ness is set to 50%, and Wi-Fi is on (thanks to the guys from Engad­get), then the dif­fer­ence with Trans­former Prime is almost 1 hour, which is a lot. And this dif­fer­ence will be even more sig­nif­i­cant if you run some heavy game. But what kind of dis­play does Infin­i­ty have, right?

About the docking station

For Trans­former Infin­i­ty, a new “key­board-dock­ing sta­tion” mod­ule has been released, which dif­fers from the Prime dock­ing sta­tion in only one and not for the bet­ter — bat­tery capac­i­ty (19.5 Wh ver­sus 22 Wh). Nei­ther the dimen­sions nor the weight of the dock­ing sta­tion have changed, so the dif­fer­ence in bat­ter­ies is sur­pris­ing.

How­ev­er, the fact that the dock­ing sta­tion from Prime ful­ly fits the Infin­i­ty tablet is very pleas­ant.

Dimensions and weight

The tablet is only slight­ly thick­er and heav­ier than its pre­de­ces­sor. The dif­fer­ence is so small that it could not even be men­tioned: 0.2 mil­lime­ters thick­er and a “whole” 12 grams heav­ier.

Price and conclusions

But every­thing is very inter­est­ing with the price: abroad, at the time of writ­ing this mini-review, the cost of the Asus Trans­former Pad Infin­i­ty TF700 tablet (with NVIDIA Tegra 3, with­out a 3G mod­ule) was only 499 US dol­lars for a mod­i­fi­ca­tion with 32 GB of mem­o­ry. This is exact­ly the same as it cost at the time of the release of Trans­former Prime. At the same time, now Prime has fall­en in price quite slight­ly — by 20–40 dol­lars in the USA, for exam­ple. And if you are faced with a choice, take Prime or Infin­i­ty, then, with­out a doubt, you should pre­fer the sec­ond. And, per­son­al­ly, I would take Infin­i­ty not so much because of the high-res­o­lu­tion dis­play, but because the new tablet does not have Prime’s “con­gen­i­tal pathol­o­gy” — poor GPS and Wi-Fi.

What if it’s something else?

A good alter­na­tive to this tablet can be the Acer Ico­nia Tab A700, which has its own advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages. The cost abroad for the A700 is almost the same as for Infin­i­ty, but in EU the sit­u­a­tion is slight­ly dif­fer­ent and not in favor of Asus: Acer prod­ucts cost only a lit­tle more in EU than abroad, which can­not be said about Asus.