Hitting the shelves December 8, the Asus Eee Pad known as Transformer Prime promises to be the fastest tablet on the market.

Despite the news of its availability having been made only a few weeks ago, the tablet is available for pre-order from retailers like Best Buy (News - Alert), B&H, GameStop and Tiger Direct.

What’s big about this tablet is, at least according to the buzz, it’s the tablet we’ve all been waiting for. Transformer Prime features Android (News - Alert) 3.2, 10.1 inch display, quad core processor, 32GB/64GB internal memory and WiFi along with the usual Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS. It has been priced at $499 for the 32GB and $599 for the 64GB variant in the United States.

According to Business Insider, Asus gets its bragging rights on this piece of equipment from the Tegra 3quad-core processor.

The processor is supposedly “the world’s first quad-core mobile processor,” according to Nvidia. The new Tegra 3 consists an ARM (News - Alert) Cortex A9 CPU with integrated 12-core GeForce GPU.

As spotted by Android and Me, The Asus Transformer Prime rocketed up the Best Selling Computer Tablets chart on Amazon, and the retailer’s pre-order page now tells customers: “Sign up to be notified when this item becomes available.”

There seemed to have been some confusion as to what Android OS the tablet would feature. While reports say 3.2, initial reports claimed that it would run 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich.  So far, the consensus says 3.2.

Other specs and features include a 5-megapixel camera, 1.2-megapixel webcam, 4-in-1 media reader, lithium-polymer battery, Bluetooth 2.1 interface for linking other Bluetooth devices and it’s lightweight at only 2.2 lb and only 0.5-inches thick. There’s also an SD card slot. Additionally, an optional keyboard docking accessory is also available with a QWERTY keyboard allowing the Eee Pad Transformer to be used like a fully-fledged PC.

An Nvidia YouTube (News - Alert) video posted last week revealed that the new Transformer Prime’s Ice Cream Sandwich is running smoothly. The video also demonstrated how the new Google (News - Alert) mobile operating system handles a tablet computer and how a compatible application is taking advantage of the new platform which was designed by Google from the ground up.