It’s a great day to breathe red, white and blue; the ASUS Transformer Prime is presumably shipping out of Amazon, Best Buy and perhaps other online shops in the USA. Sadly, ASUS delayed the tablet in Europe in favor of an early 2012 launch. At least we know it’s intended to land in Italy and the England in Jan, and we think it’ll drip its way into stores around the globe over the coming weeks.

Also, the quad-core Transformer Prime will get the Android 4.0 update, and it may hit your device sooner than you’d think. The company claims the update should become available in the first month of the new year, but everyone knows how much we will trust the plans of a consumer-electronics company (only really a touch).

You can pick up the quad-core Transformer Prime from Amazon in 32GB gray , 64 GB gray , 32GB champagne , and 64GB champagne. These units do not ship with the keyboard dock, which is required for a laptop-style Android experience.

The company exposed details of the tablet at AsiaD 2011 in October, reporting plans for a late 2012 launch. The launch was delayed several times, forcing the various parties involved to hold on the American launch until the week of Christmas. I initially thought a launch close to X-Mas was an unlikely move, but we are glad to see that’s not true. The Transformer Prime by ASUS will cost you about $500 or $600 depending on the model you choose.

The Transformer prime is the first consumer tablet to sport a quad-core chip, specifically the Tegra 3 by NVIDIA, and is supposed to usher in a new era of mobile computing. We’ll have to see about that, but it is certainly a strong competitor against the iPad, the Kindle Fire and even laptops. As desktops and notebooks decrease in popularity, tablet devices and mobile phones will replace them in our daily lives.

Subscribe to the ASUS Transformer Prime’s product page, and we’ll update you as new developments occur. At ReleaseDates, we keep you updated on the stuff you want.

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