ASUS may be new to the premium tablet market, however, as anyone who has experienced the firm's customer service will know, it isn't always the best listener and this failing appears to have translated to the design of the Transformer Prime, NVIDIA Tegra 3-powered Android tablet.
Despite large-scale warning signs, such as perfectionist, Apple, scaring its iPad with a plastic bar for the sake of a good 3G signal and releasing rubber cases to improve signal-strength on the iPhone 4, ASUS, whilst new to the market, took no note of the original lessons on offer all around it and, from this, initial batches of the Transformer Prime, with its unibody metallic case, suffered from poor GPS performance, angering users who had made plans for the Prime's GPS functionality.
Initially ASUS attempted to correct the issue with firmware updates, however, simply bounced between various trade-offs of speed and signal-strength, with, by the end of the matter, some tablets unable to receive satellite signals through a pane of glass on a windowsill.
After publicly admitting that the unibody design of the Prime was the primary culprit and, refreshing its line-up to include plastic bars, ASUS came to its senses and offered up a free GPS dongle for owners of affected models. The dongle is essentially a strip that fits less intrusively to the case than a typical USB dongle, though requires the use of the tablet's docking port and so can not be used in conjunction with the keyboard or charger cable.
A bit of a double-edged sword, however it's important to respect that ASUS is at last offering a FREE solution to GPS woes. Affected users can head on over to the GPS Extension kit application site to apply for their free dongle.
