Ice Cream Sandwich on the Transformer Prime

[John Kotches]

Late yesterday evening, Asus started making the promised upgrade to ICS/ Android 4.0 to owners of this tablet. For those who have worked with honeycomb/3.x there aren't many huge differences from a UI perspective.

So far, my experience has been positive with only a few small issues. Overall the tablet feels subjectively faster than HC. Whether this is due to optimization for tegra3 or just my knowledge that I'm on the latest and greatest remains to be seen. I haven't run before and after benchmarks for comparisn.

The issues? I can't tether to my phone via WiFi and a couple of apps are force closing.

Im sure there will be more to come on this topic as this hits more platforms.

Sent from my Transformer Prime TF201 using Tapatalk

 

[John Kotches]

I've been running ICS for about a week and it feels very polished. The number of times I've sworn (other than about the WiFi tether issue) has been very few for a "new" rev of an OS. I use quotation marks as the UI layer is almost identical to HC so I haven't had to learn new ways of doing things.

I still get a few force closed apps, but this is at the level of an infrequent nuisance.

The only other problems stem from not having a few KO (kernel object / modules) files. CIFS and MD4 (needed if you're going to mount up CIFS shares) and several required for VPN (tun.ko being the big one). Fortunately 3rd parties have compiled them from the appropriate sources and made them available to the community.

The WiFi tether issue is not universal, it seems to be specific to certain phones / ROMs including my Photon on rooted stock.

Asus has promised a bootloader unlock, but has failed to deliver on that at this time.

 

[mogera]

I've not had the tethering issue since I got the 4GB data plan from AT&T ( company discount). I AM disappointed that some of the apps that I've grown to depend on from my Galaxy S 2 aren't updated for ICS. I was really looking forward to the "Watch ESPN" app.

Sent from my Transformer Prime TF201 using Tapatalk