Asus Customer Support - "Known Issue, upgraded hardware if.."

[bbalz]

So I'm going on my 3rd Prime today... The first I got from Best Buy through web order and when it came I was pumped.

Immediately opened it up, logged in and allowed it to upgrade to ICS.

Soon after it began to reboot every 5-10 minutes and freeze in applications. I called and did a factory reset 3 times and same results. They issued me an RMA # but decided to just return it to Best Buy and wait until a store nearby had them in stock... so if I had issues I could just do an exchange.

Found out yesterday a place near my work got 26 of them in. I went there and got one... set everything up at work. Got home and had time to play with it and black lines kept flashing from time to time across the screen. Extremely irritating. The wireless was very poor too, it kept disconnecting and I was 10 feet from the router.

I returned it for another one (as you can see, I really like this tablet...)... I noticed it has a minor backlight bleed on the top right but think I can get over it for the most part. The wireless though is a 1/4 of the speed as 3 other devices on my network. Other devices are pulling down 10-12 mbps and the best the Prime is doing is 3-4mbps. Uploading sometimes even goes as low as 7-15 KILObytes per second.

Needless to say, I called Asus and asked them if there are known issues with the poor wireless and any fixes.

The friendly person said that it is a known issue and often people find better performance if they reset their router at home.

I amused him by doing this, but no difference. I was getting full wireless bars but the performance wasn't near where it should be.

He then mentioned that it is a known issue and that I could send it in to get fixed (along with the screen bleed on the top right). When I asked him what will get fixed... he said that they would upgrade the hardware for the wireless and possibly replace the back plate with an upgraded one. The look and feel would be the same but the device would have be much better for wireless.

Has anyone else heard of this? Upgrading the hardware in the device if you RMA it back to them?

Also, has anyone actually done this yet? Positive results?

I'm debating on this or just returning it and waiting for a different tablet with ICS that works without any issues out of the box.

Thanks in advance and sorry for the novel... :-\

 

[hmackenz]

Wow! sorry you had such bad luck. I haven't heard anything about this. Please keep us updated! Good luck!

 

[bbalz]

Yeah, bad luck doesn't even cover it... I think it maybe the fact that after reading the forums and issues, it brings a lot of it to my attention.

I know when I owned my Xoom, it had great wireless reception and better speeds than any other device I had at the time.

I think I will give it another 24 hours to think about it, although I'm leaning towards a refund. I paid $79.99 for 1 year coverage on it for anything that happens, stepping on it, water damage etc. I have 7 days to get a full refund so I think I may just return it tomorrow and call it quits. I don't want to get a 4th and have to run through all this again.

 

[arctic388]

I wonder how long it would take to send it to them and get it back. i am wanting one bad but my gut is telling me to wait until the next version comes out.

 

[Sixshooter]

So, I heard about the issues and here is what I have found:

1. The device does show lower bars. When I got my prime I had a Belkin 54g from 2003. I upgraded to a Linksys e3200 (dual band wireless N) and it was much better - incidentally so were my overall upload/download speeds for all other devices - but it is still weaker than my evo3D or Nook Color or my 2nd gen iPod Touch. When I upgraded the router, I did notice that there were more bars. I could almost never get 4 bars right next to the router until I upgraded it. Now, I get 4 bars if I'm in direct line of sight. At work, I sit right under the access point and I get about 2-3 bars.

2. There are screen flicker issues and other weird anomalies. But that was to be expected. I would almost rather this than sitting and waiting until June when Android 5.0 comes out. It can suck because people want this to be as smooth as iOS. (Or at least launch YouTube without the damn thing crashing). Still, it hasn't been prohibitive and I've only had to reset once. Most of the time just hitting the power key does it.

3. Unless the backplate is still the spun aluminum they can keep their new fangled backplate. I work in a group with "elite" technologists - which is a fancy way of saying that they are engineers and architects who are Apple fanboys. And yet, even they could not deny the "awesomeness" and build quality of this device.

Jus sayin'

 

[bbalz]

So, I heard about the issues and here is what I have found:

1. The device does show lower bars. When I got my prime I had a Belkin 54g from 2003. I upgraded to a Linksys e3200 (dual band wireless N) and it was much better - incidentally so were my overall upload/download speeds for all other devices - but it is still weaker than my evo3D or Nook Color or my 2nd gen iPod Touch. When I upgraded the router, I did notice that there were more bars. I could almost never get 4 bars right next to the router until I upgraded it. Now, I get 4 bars if I'm in direct line of sight. At work, I sit right under the access point and I get about 2-3 bars.

2. There are screen flicker issues and other weird anomalies. But that was to be expected. I would almost rather this than sitting and waiting until June when Android 5.0 comes out. It can suck because people want this to be as smooth as iOS. (Or at least launch YouTube without the damn thing crashing). Still, it hasn't been prohibitive and I've only had to reset once. Most of the time just hitting the power key does it.

3. Unless the backplate is still the spun aluminum they can keep their new fangled backplate. I work in a group with "elite" technologists - which is a fancy way of saying that they are engineers and architects who are Apple fanboys. And yet, even they could not deny the "awesomeness" and build quality of this device.

Jus sayin'

Not sure what to take from this but I agree with most of it.

I've always been a jump first at new android devices, og droid, galaxy nexus, motorola xoom and now this one. I've dealt with bugs in the software but usually with the Xoom for example, it was just FC'ing of applications that needed to be updated. Never was it horrible wireless speeds, tons of random reboots and freezing.

I simply just had bad luck with the device so far and I REALLY want to love it because of the design, feel of it and slick speed of ICS on it. The fact that is has screen bleeding is just bad quality of build and the wifi speeds being 1/4 of the other devices I have has to be a design flaw or hardware issue... I can't imagine it's just software or my network... since everything else has had no issues in the past.

Again I WANT to love this and keep it but I can't justify the money for it with the amount of issues I've ran into with 3 exchanges. :-(

 

[apuckett83]

Im having the same issues with the Wifi and debating on shipping it to them. I seem to get better Wifi then you. Mine will be at 54 then go to 16, then 24, just jumps all around.

Did they actually say they might replace the back plate?! Wow. They should do this for all Primes.