Difference Between Huawei MediaPad 10 FHD and Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF201

Huawei MediaPad 10 FHD vs Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF201 | Speed, Performance and Features Reviewed | Full Specs Compared
 

The convergence theory in economics suggests that the minor economies tend to grow at faster rates than major economies due to various reasons. One such reason is deemed as the minor economies ability to replicate the production methods used in major economies. Although the replication is not of direct correspondence here, we can apply convergence theory into the mobile phone market considering the major economies as the leading vendors and minor economies as the following vendors. In such terms, leading vendors such as Samsung has grown at a lower rate compared to vendors like Huawei and Asus whose market shares hadn’t been that significant. The reason for that conclusion is the recent advancements they have attained in the tablet industry.

Samsung used to have a firm grip on the tablet industry, but now they seem to have loosened it for products of a general nature. The dominance of the high end tablet line was obtained by Asus and Acer sometime back when they released Eee Pad and Iconia tablets respectively. Now Huawei is in the game, as well. The chairman of the Huawei devices announced Huawei MediaPad 10 FHD at the MWC 2012, and he claimed it as the fastest quad core tablet available and world’s first quad core tablet. The first claim may well be true but, the latter one isn’t true; Asus and Acer had that honor from sometime back. Regardless that, MediaPad does introduce some cutting edge features for 10 inch tablet collection. Huawei tags it as an entertainment device, but we see far more potential in MediaPad than that. Let us have a look at it and make a comparison between MediaPad and Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF201, to set up an initial benchmark for the new guy at the corner.

Huwei MediPad 10 FHD

Huawei MediaPad is designed to excel in three fundamental usage patterns generic to the tablets; the purpose of gaming, viewing multimedia content and browsing internet with reading e-books. We agree with that comment from the chairman of Huawei Devices and we’ll demonstrate exactly why in the next paragraphs. MediaPad 10 has 10 inches IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen that features a super resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels at a pixel density of 226ppi. If you have the slightest experience in tablets, you would know that this display panel offered by Huawei MediaPad is one of the best available in the market. As far as I’m concerned, only Asus and Acer have display panels of this magnitude and even their ones don’t have rich pixel density as this. In simple terms, this is a display you can use in broad daylight and still have a clear view; this is a display that has an ultra-high resolution which is only offered by few laptops; this is a display that has such rich color and image reproduction and, with this display, reading texts would be just as clear as when you’re reading them on a paper.

MediaPad has a pleasing design and the ergonomics are agreeable. The slate is of 8.8mm thickness and 898g of weight. It comes in either Black or White, but that wasn’t confirmed at the MWC. MediaPad is made a beast using 1.5GHz quad core K3 processor on top of Huawei K3V2 chipset with 2GB of RAM. The reins of control lie with Android OS 4.0 ICS, which we consider ideal for that job. It is indeed a beast trying to burst open the reins and come out. Both the processor and chipset are proprietary devices from Huawei; thus, we aren’t really familiar with them. The specs sound all good, and Huawei claims this as the fastest tablet. Of course, it’s needless to say that MediaPad would perform better than any dual core tablets out there and with 2GB of RAM; it has plenty of memory in abundance to make the user experience smooth and perfect. It comes with super-fast LTE connectivity that can gracefully degrade to HSDPA when the reception is not good. This is something that lacked in Eee Pad and Huawei has treated it well. It also comes with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n for continuous connectivity, and the fact that it can act as a wi-fi hotspot makes you the favorite among your friend because you can share your super-fast internet connection. Huawei has also included a 8MP rear camera that has autofocus and LED flash along with geo tagging. I have to say, I’m no fan of taking snaps with a tablet, but nonetheless, this is a great camera and, what’s more, it can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second. It also has 1.3MP front facing camera for the purpose of video conferencing.

Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF201

Eee Pad is a Prime in its class. Asus has embedded Prime with Nvidia’s 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3 Processor. Transformer Prime is actually the first device to carry a processor of that magnitude, and the very first to feature Nvidia Tegra 3. The processor itself is optimized with Nvidia’s Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing technology or, in simple terms, the ability to switch between higher and lower cores depending on the task at hand. The beauty of it is, you won’t even notice that a switch happened from a higher core to a lower one once you close a game and switch into reading.

Asus Eee Pad Transformer also comes with breathtaking graphics, specially their featured water ripple effect. Nvidia states that the game developers have unified the additional pixel processing capabilities of the GPU with the calculation power of multiple cores to work out the physics underneath. The 1GB RAM plays a considerable role in the ultimate optimization and transformation.

Asus has granted their brainchild a 10.1 inches Super IPS LCD Capacitive touchscreen, featuring a 1280 x 800 resolution with a pixel density of 149ppi. The Super IPS LCD screen enables you to use your tablet in the bright daylight without any problem. It has scratch resistant display with the strength of Gorilla Glass display, accelerometer sensor and Gyro sensor. Been a tablet, it is intended to be bulkier than a mobile phone, but surprisingly, it scores a thickness of 8.3mm, which is incredible. It only weighs 586g which is even lighter than iPad 2. Asus hasn’t forgotten the camera, as well. The 8MP camera was the best camera we have seen so far in any tablet PC. It comes with 1080p HD video capturing, autofocus, LED flash, and Geo-tagging. They have also provided a front camera bundled with Bluetooth v2.0 for the ardent delight of the video chatters. Since Asus provides internal storage of either 32 or 64 GB and the ability to expand up to 32GB using a microSD card, the space to store all high quality snaps you take won’t be an issue, as well.

So far, we’ve been talking about the hardware aspects of the Tablet, and what bids them altogether is the tablet optimized Android v3.2 Honeycomb. Transformer Prime also comes with the promise of an update to v4.0 IceCreamSandwich and which is all the more reason to rejoice. That been said, we got to say that, Honeycomb flavor of Prime just doesn’t do his fair deal for the Prime. It has an imminent gap where the OS is only optimized for dual core processors, quad core applications are yet to be defined. Let us hopefully wait for the v4.0 IceCreamSandwich upgrade for better optimized solutions for multi core processors. Besides that fact, everything looks good in Asus Eee Pad. It comes in a pleasing look with an Aluminum back plane of either Amethyst Gray or Champagne Gold. Another differentiating feature of the Eee Pad is the ability to be docked to a full QWERTY Chiclet keyboard dock, which enhances the battery life up to 18 hours, which is beyond awesome. With this addition, Transformer Prime simply becomes a notebook whenever it’s needed. Not only that, but this dock would have a touch pad, and a USB port which is an added advantage. Even without the add-on battery of the dock, the standard battery itself is said to do 12 hours straight up. While Eee Pad defines it’s connectivity through Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n with the ability to act as a wi-fi hotspot, it does lack the element of HSDPA connectivity at the places where wi-fi isn’t a possibility. While 1080p HD video playback would be a usual suspect, Asus has added an element of surprise with the inclusion of SonicMaster supreme sound technology. Asus has also introduced three performance modes and can be considered as the first Tablet PC adapted to such a strategy. It also features some demo versions of games that holds our breath and hopefully, there will be more and more games optimized for multi core processors and cutting edge GPUs.

Conclusion

With the observations we have made so far; MediaPad has a slightly overclocked processor, although, there won’t be much difference in the performance compared to Eee Pad. Anyhow, what makes us favor for MediaPad is the super high definition display panel that features 1920 x 1200 pixels resolution and the ultra-fast LTE connectivity. The tradeoff is going to be price since for these two features; you would have to pay dearly. Let us wait till Huawei list down the prices for the devices they unveiled at MWC 2012, and then we can decide.