A pre-order listing on Newegg shows that the upcoming Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet is slated to launch on December 8. The device will come packed with Nvidia's new Tegra 3 SoC clocked at 1.30 GHz, and sport 1 GB of DDR2 memory, 32 GB of storage and a typical pricetag of $499.99 USD.
"Paired for perfection," states Asus on its tablet-oriented website. "The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is the perfect example of what a tablet should be. The innovative design not only seamlessly provides the user with a keyboard, touchpad and expandability options, but also battery life up to 18 hours for all day computing and productivity."
Strangely enough, the Asus website doesn't list Newegg as an official pre-order site, but instead lists Amazon, B&H, Best Buy, TigerDirect and even GameStop. That said, Newegg is the only online retailer that's actually listing a ship date, leading us to wonder if the release date is even valid.
When launched next month, the Transformer Prime tablet will sport Google's Android 3.2 "Honeycomb" OS backed by Nvidia's quad-core Tegra 3 SoC, 1 MB of L2 cache, DirectX 11-capable GPU cores and a 10.1-inch 1280 x 600 resolution screen made out of Gorilla Glass. It will also feature an 8MP rear-facing camera, a 1.2MP front-facing camera, a microSD slot, a mini-HDMI port and 802.11 b/g/n connectivity.
The Transformer Prime will be the first tablet to use Nvidia's new Tegra chip, but it will also reportedly be the first tablet capable of running Google's next edition of Android, v4.0 aka "Ice Cream Sandwich." A separate 64 GB version priced at the typical $599.99 USD will launch sometime soon, but neither model will sport 3G connectivity.
