Underlines that using custom firmwares will void your warranty

Jan 4, 2012 01:21 GMT  ·  By

After all the availability issues faced by the Transformer Prime in North America, the tablet has now received a series of new complaints regarding battery life, GPS problems and the locked bootloader which were recently addressed in a statement made by Asus officials.

The first complaints about battery life made their appearance a short while ago, when reviewers have found out that in some tests the Transformer Prime lags behind the original Transformer tablet in this regard.

Soon after this discovery was made, it was also uncovered that the built-in GPS had a series of difficulties when it came to finding and maintaining the connection with navigation satellites.

The Verge actually conducted a test in this regard in which in compared the Transformer Prime with a Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, both with data connectivity turned off.

Asus’ tablet had a tough time acquiring the same number of satellites as the Samsung smartphone, and even failed to lock some of them.

As an unofficial response, Asus US has removed the GPS from the tablet’s specifications page and recently has started pushing a new OTA software update that is supposed to resolve these GPS issues.

Asus Italy has however decided to go one step beyond this and responded to all these issues in a statement made on the company’s official Facebook page.

As Notebook Italia reports, Asus blames these problems mostly on the testing scenarios used by reviewers and points out that the tablet’s maximum autonomy was measured with only ”light” usage and all the energy saving features active.

In response to the GPS tests run by The Verge, Asus commented that comparing a smartphone with a tablet isn’t a fair test as the latter can’t take advantage of the aGPS technology available to GPS-capable cellular phones.

Furthermore, Asus doesn’t imagine why anyone would want to use the Transformer Prime for navigation, either on the street or in-car, and believes that a smartphone is far better suited to fulfill this role.

Finally, as far as the locked bootloader is concerned, Asus Italy has this to say: “The product is guaranteed as it is. Different firmware altering the basic functionality of the product or pushing the hardware beyond the standard frequencies will void your warranty and may threaten the reliability and proper functioning of the product itself.”

It’s important to note that Asus Italy has promised that the Primes that will arrive in Europe won’t suffer from the same troubles as the tablets sold overseas.