Hot on the heels of my recent post about ASUS tablets, Digitimes has a quote from another ASUS supremo, Jerry Shen, at a recent conference in Taiwan. Apparently Mr. Shen claims the company is well on the way to making its Eee Pad to take on the mighty fruity-Pad and it will be unveiled at Computex in early June this year, before hitting the stores in the months following.
While actual meaty details are thin, Mr. Shen highlights ASUS has beefed up the industrial design of the product, while similtaineously co-operated with industry giants, Google and Nvidia, to adopt the Andriod platform as the core software and Tegra hardware ARM processor. It’s not just a mirrored competitor to the iPad however, as ASUS plans to kit it out with basic essentials like USB, a webcam and – low and behold – even Adobe Flash support.
Previously Nvidia’s Tegra processor has had success in the Microsoft ZuneHD and the Boxee Box, and it should be more graphically capable than Apples offering in clock-to-clock performance, however we wonder if Nvidia has upped the core clock or a new version to compete with the 1GHz A4.
Full Flash support is a key win-angle for ASUS – as Apple has so vehemently denied the web standard on its product, ASUS looks to take advantage in opening up the web for real.
ASUS’ Eee Pad should eat into the netbook market by some 10-20 per cent, but it will further broaden the Eee brand beyond netbooks, laptops, all-in-one PCs and even keyboards (have I forgotten anything?) to strengthen the brand.
At an estimated $500 market price for the 3G version, ASUS expects to ship just over 300,000 in the second half of 2010 – a pretty impressive number for a new market, so it’ll be interesting to see if it’s achievable.
There’s still no further details on things like display choices, sizes or interface type, and if we remember back to Johnny Shih’s comments – there’s no talk now about the second, Microsoft based tablet. Is ASUS waiting for Windows 7 Phone Series OS to arrive in Q4 before shipping a second product?
With Computex just five weeks away I’m going to start camping outside ASUS HQ with a long camera lens trying to get a sneak peek, or, I’ll go beg the girls on the front desk to let me in, but I won’t attempt to blow the house down as that would be counter productive. Oh, and I know it’s built to withstand Typhoons.
Either way, I really want to play with some industrialised Tegra-Android ASUS tablet action! (Wow, that’s more than a mouthful than I anticipated).
