Asus Transformer Prime Release Date Is December 18, Best Buy Says

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Yesterday we told you that the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Android Honeycomb tablet is finally available for pre-order in North America, from quite a few American and Canadian retailers, but we were not able to offer you any release dates at the time neither Asus nor its partners mentioned it.

All that has changed today as Best Buy has apparently revealed the “pre-order release date” in one of its pre-order confirmation emails. As you can see above, one customer ordered three 32GB Transformer Prime versions which are all expected to ship on December 18, a week ahead of Christmas, or just in time to place them neatly under a Christmas tree.

On top of Best Buy, there are four more electronics retailers that stock the device: Amazon, B&H, GameStop and TigerDirect. In Canada Future Shop and NCIX will take your Prime pre-orders. As for prices, you’ll be paying $499 for the 32GB Prime version or $599 for the 64GB tablet. These prices do not include taxes or the keyboard dock you’ll need to turn this baby into an Android tablet.

While the Transformer Prime will not be the first tablet in the world to ship with Ice Cream Sandwich on board, it will certainly be the first one to pack a powerful 1.3GHz quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 processor. Add to that a 10.1-inch touchscreen display with IPS technology and 1,280 x 800 resolution, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, 32GB/64GB of storage with further SD card slot expansion, an 8-megapixel camera with LED flash and autofocus, 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera and a 12 hours of battery life and you get yourself a more than decent Android device. Asus also confirmed the tablet will be updated to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich at some point in the future, which is one more reason to purchase the device.

Have you pre-ordered it already?