Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime has generated an awful lot of lust among Android tablet enthusiasts. It’s the first device to ship with an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor. It has an excellent camera (if you want to use a 10 inch tablet to snap photos). And there’s an optional keyboard dock which lets you use the tablet like a laptop (and the dock also has its own battery which means you should be able to run for 15 hours or longer on a charge).

But while those feature may be attractive, some of the customers who picked up the Transformer Prime in the hopes of replacing the default Asus software with a custom ROM may be disappointed.

The folks at xda-developers have discovered that the Transformer Prime has a locked bootloader protected by 128 bit AES encryption. In other words, while the tablet can be rooted, there’s no simple way to install a custom ROM such.

For most people this isn’t a huge problem. Asus has promised to release an official software update soon which will upgrade the tablet from Android 3.2 to Android 4.0. But if you wanted to try out an early build of Google’s latest operating system, install a custom kernel with support for overclocking or underclocking, or make some other system-level changes, that locked bootloader gets in the way.

It’s possible that hackers could eventually find a way to load custom software anyway, but unless Asus provides a way to unlock the bootloader, the options will remain limited.

via reddit

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6 replies on “Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime’s locked bootloader means no custom ROMS (for now)”

    1. Where does it say anything about the Transformer Prime on that page? It looks like it only covers the original Transformer.

  1. This is not true. You can install Linux on Asus transformer and prime.  Its not easy but you can.  I suggest you stop spreading information that is not true.

  2. Can anyone fill me in on what the rationale is for a locked bootloader on a device like this that is not tied to a content company? I recall seeing it mentioned somewhere that Netflix HD requires a locked bootloader. Why? Is there some security concern with being able to watch HD movies?

  3. This sets a very bad precedent, in my opinion.
    Remember when Microsoft made that announcement about Windows 8 requiring hardware to have a similar locked bootloader  and many people were up in arms since they couldn’t install previous versions of Windows or alternative operating systems like Linux or BSD?

    MS came out and said they’d leave it to the OEMs. Well, this gives an indication of what OEMs do.

    F*ck them all I say. If I plonk my hard-earned cash to buy hardware, I sure as hell wanna do what I see fit with it!!

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