It's already here. Just over a month after the quad-core Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime hit the market, the company has released its promised over-the-air update to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)—making it the first production tablet we can get our hands on that runs the new OS. The update is actually a few days ahead of schedule; last week Asus had announced that the target date would be January 12th.
For the unacquainted, Ice Cream Sandwich is a huge update. It offers a unified interface across phones and tablets, a vastly improved browser, and a nicer address book, with lots of smaller improvements along the way. So you probably want it—especially if you're an Android enthusiast. But does it measure up? We gave it a whirl on our loaner Transformer Prime to find out.
Once you load Ice Cream Sandwich, it gives you some short tutorial tips as you work your way through, such as how to bring up the main menu or add shortcuts to the home screens. Right from the start, though, the changes are already apparent. The lock screen looks cleaner. The Roboto system font looks smoother and classier throughout the OS. The menus now have some flex as you scroll past the edges, and you can see one page of icons appear gradually as you slide the other page out of the way. The Settings menu is divided up into categories now.
In a series of tests, the Transformer Prime worked as well or better with ICS installed as it did before. I watched standalone video files, listened to music, streamed high definition movie trailers from YouTube, played Zen Pinball THD, and browsed desktop Web sites, all without issue. Browsing feels much faster, although Flash is still an issue with ICS. I recorded sharp 1080p video files that played back at a smooth 30 frames per second, the same as with Honeycomb. You can swipe apps to close them now, instead of tapping the X icon. The $150 dock accessory worked just as well, with a smooth typing and multi-touch experience. If only the trackpad buttons weren't so stiff.
Unfortunately, our biggest issue with the Transformer Prime—and all Android tablets, for that matter—still remains. Pop into Android Market, and there's no easy way to figure out where the tablet apps are. There's an unsorted Staff Picks category, which thankfully now contains about 200 apps, but that's it. Individual apps have no markings about whether they're tablet compatible, meaning that they run at native screen resolution and with an interface designed for a much larger screen, or if they'll just be pixel-doubled Android phone apps. That makes app shopping unnecessarily tedious. Even as you find them one by one, it's clear there are far fewer tablet-optimized apps here than for iOS.
That said, Android 4.0 is finally gaining some real momentum. Last week, Google said on its developer Web site that Ice Cream Sandwich is now on 0.6 percent of Android devices, with 0.3 percent running Android 4.0 to 4.0.2, and the other 0.3 percent running Android 4.0.3. Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) is still the most popular version in the wild, with 55 percent of devices running it. Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablets, despite the dozens of models available, together account for just 3.3 percent of the market—and that number is likely to go down soon as more ICS updates become available for other tablets.
Overall, in this case, the ICS update did exactly what it's supposed to do—make the Transformer Prime work more fluidly and with fewer bugs. We love it. Now let's see a genuine tablet app store in Android Market, so we can really kick this sleek, quad-core machine into overdrive.