After reading the title, you must be pretty surprised to see the comparison between the Amazon Kindle Fire and the Asus Transformer Prime as the Transformer Prime is amongst the best performing tablet PC ever manufactured till date and the Amazon Kindle Fire is the second largest selling tablet in the market, but it does not stand a chance with the Asus Transformer Prime if it were in the same price range. This is not a specs and design showdown, but in fact a comparison that will help you choose a laptop which is best suited for you and for the reason why you buy a tablet PC in the first place.
We had earlier done a review on the Asus Transformer Prime and we sure as hell loved the device. Its got specs that could be in trend for quite a while and performs like a charm. The Amazon Kindle Fire on the other hand, is a very user friendly and straight forward tablet that is used to do daily duties.
Hardware Specs:
The Kindle Fire comes with a 1 GHz dual core processor that is paired with a 512 MB RAM while the Asus Transformer Prime comes with a 1.3 GHz Cortex-A9 processor with NVIDIA Tegra 3 chipset that is paired with a 1GB of RAM. Both of these devices are non GSM devices, which means that you will not be able to use 2G, 3G or 4G on both the tablets.
The Asus Transformer Prime does indeed have better specs, but you will not find those specs useful if you are planning to use the tablets for just about its basic needs like read news, surf the web or even watch movies in them. In this case, the Kindle Fire is all you need as it has sufficient performance capabilities to fulfil your basic needs. And on the connectivity side, you will have to rely on WiFi on both tablets, but sadly the Kindle doesn’t come with Bluetooth.
Screen & Camera:
When comparing the screen for both these devices, lets keep the Apple iPads screen as the mediator as most of us know how the iPads screen is! Both of these devices come with IPS screen, but the Kindle has lower resolutions. The Asus is slightly above the iPad when it comes to screen quality, which means that this device has one hell of a screen. But the Kindle Fire is not far behind the Apple iPads screen quality and hence puts it slightly lower the Apple. The Asus Transformer Prime comes with an impressive 8 MP camera with autofocus and flash at the rear, while the front features a comparatively modest 1.2 MP camera. The Amazon Kindle Fire however does not even come with a VGA camera.
The screen display in the Kindle is not bad, but it is indeed not great as the Transformer Prime. So, if you are a person who loves the richest display while surfing the web or watching a movie or even reading news, then you might want to consider going for the Prime. The Kindle however does have a pretty good screen, but not as great as the ASUS. If you are a person who does a lot of video calling and would like to do it in a tab, then the Kindle Fire should not even be considered as it has no camera.
Storage & Battery Life:
The Transformer Prime comes with 2 storage options 32 GB and 64 GB. You can even extend that with a microSD card of upto 32 GB. The Amazon Kindle Fire on the other hand does not give you an option and provides you with only an 8 GB of internal storage with no way to extend that memory. There are however rumours running around that Amazon will be coming with a 16 GB version of the Kindle Fire soon enough. The Kindle fire provides you with about 7 hours of battery life when used heavily! The Asus on the other hand gives you a battery life of about 10 hours of heavy usage and can be extended up to 18 hours when attached to the Eee Pad.
The storage options and battery life is indeed better with the Asus, but you will however have to ask yourself a couple of questions - “How much storage space do i actually need” and “will i be continuously using the tablet for more than 7 hours?”. If you clear these out, then you will know which one you are looking for.
Operating System & Applications:
The Kindle Fire comes with the Android Gingerbread operating system, which is basically used in smartphones and old tabs. But the Fire comes with Amazons own customized version of the Gingerbread that surprisingly is pretty good and really user friendly. The Transformer Prime on the other hand comes with the Android Honeycomb OS, which is pretty much what is used in every other Android tablet. Sadly the Fire does not let you access the android market directly, but it does let you access all the compatible apps and most of them are pretty good and useful. Sideloading can be done, but there have been instances where the OS had crashed because of it.
Conclusion:
If you are a person that would like a tablet via which you could use a brilliant integration of Amazons services, read news, stream music, videos, surf the net and pretty much do everything that is basic, then you can go for the $199 tablet, which is the Kindle Fire. But if you want to do other things too, then you would be much happier with the Asus Transformer Prime which starts at $499. Its totally up to you to decide whether to use that extra $300 to buy the Prime or save it and buy the Kindle Fire.
