Asus released Android 4.1 Jelly Bean for Transformer Pad TF300

The Asus Transformer Pad TF300 is one of the first Android devices to receive the new Jelly Bean 4.1 update. We downloaded the updated firmware after a couple of failed connection attempts to the very busy Asus server. After a successful update, the interesting thing we was looking for was if the updated OS would solve the TF300Ts I/O problems. Sadly, it did not. Jelly Bean introduces a range of new features to the Android platform, and most of them speeds up commonly used tasks. The camera app and picture browser are way faster than with ICS, and browsing through old photos is a breeze.

Google Now is a new app with a collection of 8 card types which learns your behaviour and adapt the content in these card according to what you have done, where you was and sport teams you like. A Weather card will show the weather for you current location and for work. Unlike on the Nexus 7 which ships with Jelly Bean, Chrome is not the default browser. The WebKit browser has improved with better HTML5 video support but the good old dialog box "Browser isn't responding. Do you want to close it?" pops up from time to time. We blame this on the TF300 I/O performance.

Our benchmarks shows that the Octane and Vellamo Javascript benchmarks has higher scores with Jelly Bean. These tests run Javascript code in the browser. The Nenamark2 app is testing the graphic performance and we noticed a slightly increase in fps from 53.3 to 54.9 which is so little that it could be caused by other things than the OS update.

The chart below shows the increase or decrease in benchmark results where Android 4.0.3 is the basis with 100%. Compared to other Android devices, the TF300 suffers from very slow I/O operations and this is where it's being punished in the Quadrant test. Strangely enough, all AnTuTu sub-tests was slower on Android 4.1, but the SD Write speed had doubled up to 123 (12MB/s) from previous 69 (5.8MB/s).