Softpedia
 

NEWS CATEGORIES:



NEWS ARCHIVE >>
SOFTPEDIA REVIEWS >>
MEET THE EDITORS >>
Home > News > Technology and Gadgets > Tablets

February 2nd, 2012, 00:31 GMT · By

Retailer Pulls Asus Transformer Prime, Stock and Reliability Issues Are to Blame

SHARE:

Adjust text size:


Asus Transformer Prime tablet
Enlarge picture
Clove, the first retailer to start selling the Transformer Prime in the UK, has just announced that it decided to pull the Asus quad-core tablet from its offer, due to availability problems and an outstanding number of technical issues.

The retailer made its decision public in a post on its official blog:

“Stock supply has been a real issue and good levels of stock are not expected until late February/March.

“However we have been able to obtain some stock sooner than expected; but because of complaints of faults with the model we took the decision to thoroughly test stock before fulfilling any orders.

“We are at this time not satisfied that all units we could provide you with are working correctly, and performing to the standard we expect of the unit.

“We have therefore taken the decision until further notice stop selling the Asus
Transformer Prime.”

As a result of this decision, Clove cancelled all Transformer Prime orders placed by its clients so far and won’t start selling Asus’ tablet again, until it considers that the situation has changed.

Ever since the quad-core tablet started selling, Asus struggled to deliver enough units to meet demand.

Furthermore, shortly after Asus shipped the first Primes to its customers, many started to complain about the dodgy GPS performance of the tablet, so the company decided to remove GPS functionally from the TF201 specs sheet in the US.

More recently, Transformer Prime owners trying to update to Android 4.0 ran into a new series of problems, which so far haven’t been resolved.

These range from a “serial number not found” error, that prevents the update from installing, to a series of random freezes which affect the Primes running the latest version of Android.

TELL US WHAT YOU THINK:

2,303 hits · 5 comments · Link to this article · Print article · Send to friend · Subscribe to news

MUST-READ RELATED ARTICLES:


Asus Radeon HD 7950 DirectCU II Now Official, Priced at $499.99 (€ 379)

Asus Details Workaround for Transformer Prime Android 4.0 Lockup Issues

Asus G55 and G75 ROG Notebooks with Ivy Bridge CPUs Will Arrive in April

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet Will Get Android 4.0 ICS in Q2 2012

Nook Tablet Gets Android Market Access Once Again Using New Root Method

READER COMMENTS:


Comment #1 by: Nick O'Shanter on 02 Feb 2012, 02:52 UTC reply to this comment

Blimey, I thought only Amazon had pulled the Prime off their shelves. Now this is bad news, Clove is one of the biggest tablet stores in the UK and their decision could spur the others to quit selling it. So what about those who own their Primes, are they going to lose any support from the dealers now? And who can blame them, it seems Asus has rushed this product out the door without bothering to check its quality. I was thinking twice about it, but now I've made up my mind to wait for the next model and hopefully Asus would have corrected all the problems by that time.


Comment #2 by: KnightMck on 02 Feb 2012, 10:25 UTC reply to this comment

Fair play to Clove.
It will be them that get the brunt of customer complaints if/when the numerous issues with this unit come to light, and not Asus.
Asus saying that there are no issues and have all been tested under laboratory conditions isn't much of a reassurance to me, I want mine to work at home!
I was soooooo keen to get this piece of kit, but with the reported issues I decided to wait for a while until the quality stabilised and Android 4 was pre-installed.
But at this rate I may as well wait a bit longer and see what the HD version is like...or what other tablets are available.


Comment #3 by: Bryanxst on 02 Feb 2012, 10:37 UTC reply to this comment

It's pretty obvious that the first units were rushed out and some have proven to be defective; not a good move by Asus. However Clove, being the first to take pre-orders; a move to get a jump-start on competitors, have found themselves unable to fulfill their customer promise on delivery as no new batch Primes are being released to the UK by Asus until February 20th. I'm afraid Clove are feeling the heat and have issued this blog statement in an attempt to deflect criticism from their customer service debacle. I am still looking forward to receiving my Prime in late February from a quality retailer (John Lewis) in the confidence that if I have any issues with the unit customer service will be exemplary.


Comment #4 by: Bryanxst on 02 Feb 2012, 11:20 UTC reply to this comment

Looking at the Clove site, it seems to me that they have the early US stock as the 64 gb units are not supposed to be available at all in the UK.


Comment #5 by: Demandrian on 03 Feb 2012, 15:28 UTC reply to this comment

This story doesn't touch upon all of the issues. The device also suffers from very poor wifi performance as distance from the router increases, 10x that of other devices. Even worse, if bluetooth is enabled, wifi at times doesn't work at all. Check out the posts at www.xda-developers.com

Copyright © 2001-2012 Softpedia. Contact/Tip us at

WindowsGamesDriversMacLinuxScriptsMobileHandheldNews

SUBMIT PROGRAM   |   ADVERTISE   |   GET HELP   |   SEND US FEEDBACK   |   RSS FEEDS   |   UPDATE YOUR SOFTWARE   |   ROMANIAN FORUM