Asus was teasing with a countdown to the official reveal of their touchscreen Windows 8 devices and has finally gone live with some content that explains the rather confusing lineup. We’ve prepared a breakdown of the products, pricing, and release dates below.

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A number of companies are now betting on hybrid computers to be the next big thing with Windows 8. We’ve seen the Duo 11 from Sony, the Samsung ATIV, Asus TaiChi and Transformer Book — all hybrids — and now HP is announcing the Envy X2 with Windows 8 and touchscreen. The X2 takes on the familiar ‘transformer’ form-factor which is outwardly a standard laptop form-factor but the screen can be detached and toted around as a tablet. The question remains whether Windows 8 will provide a sufficient touchscreen experience, or if all of these hybrid devices will be used as standard laptops more often than not.

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Touchscreen Ultrabook reference design

Microsoft and Intel have made it no secret that they want to bring touchscreen computing to Windows and the x86 platform. The Windows 8 Release Preview will be made available in the first week of June, the same week that the annual Computex technology fair is being held in Taipei. The timing is unlikely coincidental. We’re likely to see the debut of market-ready touchscreen Ultrabooks running the Windows 8 Release Preview at Computex, a new Ultrabook from Dell could be among them.

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