If you’ve read the live blog of the ASUS event today you’ll be aware that 4 devices were launched. It’s interesting to note that there were no traditional netbooks launched which indicates a mainstream status (some will call that ‘death’) of the netbook. What ASUS are doing here is looking for new form factors and operating systems for the 10 inch category and this Eee Pad Slider [product tracking] is one of them.
Priced at $499 $799, this looks to be a rather good variant of a ‘netvertible.’ In fact, it’s more of a ‘net’-vertible than many other devices we’ve seen. Honeybcomb makes sense here. Tegra 2 should be no surprise. Congratulations to Nvidia for becoming the platform of choice for that version of the OS!
We’ve talked about this before with the Toshibas AC100 and Compaq Airlife 100. It’s the crossover of the smartphone operating system into productivity land.
The launch timescale of May alligns with Honeycomb. All that remains is the critically important task of getting quality tablet and productivity apps out there.
This could get confusing. We’ve just picked up the press release for the Asus conference and there are three different tablet devices being launched here.
Eee Tablet sounds like an e-book reader.
The Eee Pad is coming in two flavors. 12 inch with a CULV CPU and Windows 7 Home Premium and 10 inch with Windows 7 embedded.
More details and pics during the press conference.
All behind glass indicating that they are not yet ready for human consumption (read, months to go before they are ready for market) but looking good and showing that ODMs and OEMs are putting efforts into designing devices around ARM platforms. In the video you’ll get a brief view of tablets from Wistron, ASUS, Compal, Mitak, Notion Ink, Viewsonic and Foxconn.
Obviously it’s interesting to see the EeePC brand in there and it indicates that an Eee PC tablet (apparently to be called the EPad or EeePad) is on its way. Android is likely and pricing will be competitive. Netbooknews was reporting in Dec that it’s planned for March but in our recent podcast, Sascha (netbooknews) was talking about June / July. A few months to wait yet! More images of the Eee Pad below the video.