14 DAY TRIAL // With just a few more weeks to go until the Transformer Prime makes its appearance in retail stores, Asus Germany has announced a decision that is going to disappoint many of you: the company doesn’t plan to build a 3G version of the 10.1-inch tablet.
When asked on the company’s German Facebook page whether a UMTS version of the Prime is in the works, Asus said that even though there is some demand for such a device they don’t plan to build it as it doesn’t believe this will be cost-effective to develop.
“This time there will be no model with UMTS. We want to emphasize that we are aware of the strong demand for UMTS models in Germany and would like to serve.
“However, in many other countries’ UMTS networks are not so common and so the worldwide sales volumes for UMTS models are not particularly large.
“Furthermore, most UMTS pads are sold in Germany through the Telco channel and there are 1 EUR especially subsidized products requires a contract, the price point may not make an Eee Pad Transformer Prime unfortunately,” concluded the Asus Germany announcement that came our way via SlashGear.
While this response clearly mentions that an UMTS version of the Transformer Prime isn’t planned, it doesn’t say anything about CDMA/EVDO or LTE version of the tablet.
Of course that the existence of such a model depends on the tablet’s popularity in the US, not to mention the willingness of cellular operators to subsidize its price.
As many of you know, the Asus Transformer Prime is a 10.1-inch tablet powered by Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 SoC that also packs a GPS, a gyroscope, SonicMaster audio, 1.2MP front camera and 8MP rear snapper.
The tablet is expected to become available in the US between December 12-19 and it can be already pre-ordered from a series of Websites in the US, Canada and Europe with prices starting at $492 (363.5 EUR).