Asus Denies Transformer Prime Delay Rumour

Asus has denied that its Transformer Prime tablet will be delayed, with pre-orders starting to be taken in the UK.

Canadian retailer NXIC sent out a message to customers who had pre-ordered the device from it, stating that it was unlikely that the tablet would be delivered by Christmas due to issues with Wi-Fi functionality.

Don’t Panic

“Unfortunately, we just received word that the Asus Transformer Prime has been delayed worldwide and will most likely not be available before Christmas,” the email read.

“Asus feels the Wi-Fi range does not currently meet their standards and has delayed all shipments worldwide,” it continued. “At the moment there is no ETA [estimated time of arrival] and no information on available quantities on the first batch.”

Sources at Asus immediately quashed these rumours and online retailer Clove is now accepting pre-orders for the device. The 64GB and 32GB versions of the device both costing £550.80, but the 32GB version includes the keyboard accessory. Clove expects to receive the tablets in January.

Asus announced the Transformer Prime last month, revealing that it was to be powered by an Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor and a 12-core GeForce GPU. It will initially run Android 3.2 Honeycomb, but it will be swiftly updated to run the lastest version of Google’s mobile operating system, 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

The tablet boasts a metallic swirl design and is just 0.33 inches (8.38mm) thick and weighs 1.29 pounds (585g). It comes with an eight megapixel rear camera and is capable of full 1080p high definition video recording and playback.

The Transformer Prime is the successor to the Asus eeePad Transformer which was released earlier this year. The company hopes that it will challenged the iPad 2, whose share is expected to decrease as rival tablets from Android manufacturers, like Asus, begin to establish themselves in the market.