Consumers in the US are already expecting to be able to get their hands on the next Android tablet PC from Asus in the coming days. And now we have news that Asus has just made this Christmas for Android fans in the U.K, as Asus’s new Tegra 3 powered Android tablet the Transformer Prime is available for pre-order, with prices starting at £499.99, ahead of shipments beginning in January 2012. An Ice Cream Sandwich update will be pushed out OTA shortly, ASUS says.

The Eee Pad Transformer Prime is the first tablet to herald the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor. It is ultra-thin at 8.3mm and weighs only 586g and comes with state-of-the-art SonicMaster Audio technology. The 10.1-inch tablet has a high-quality IPS+ display, WiFi a/b/g/n, quadcore NVIDIA processor, an 8-megapixel main camera with 1080p Full HD video recording, and of course that special dual-battery capability. The internal battery on the Prime is rated for 12hrs alone, but the keyboard-dock adds a further 6hrs to that.

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime is a state-of-the-art tablet which docks with a keyboard and touchpad to a netbook. When it will become available in Europe, the Prime will retail for 599 EUR which gets you either the 64GB version of the Asus tablet or the 32GB model and the keyboard dock.