Meta Info: ASUS CES 2011 Updates

This is the gist of information from the ASUS Event from CES 2011

ASUS has become the first company to receive the Carbon Footprint Award and it is just one of the 3397 other awards the company has received. ASUS, based on the company claims is Number One in Portable PC reliability, Number One in Motherboards and Number Three in Portable PC sales.

A quick run down of some of the items announced today by ASUS



Eee Pad MeMO: $499 - $699: Available in June 2011
This is a svelte tablet from ASUS, which will make Bill Gates happy for the support extended to stylus as a input mechanism. The stylus is supported with pressure sensitivity on the touch screen. The tablet is running the much preferred Android OS, but the version is not confirmed. The device is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon (dual-core) and supports 1080p playback and dual cameras which is becoming standard configuration for tablets and phones these days. Going by the recent rumors, if Honeycomb is going to be supported only on Dual-Core processors, then this may be eligible for the upgrade whenever Honeycomb is going to be available. This may explain the missing Android version in the announcement

Eee Slate EP121: $999 - $1099: Available in January, 2011
This as claimed by ASUS is "the world's most powerful tablet" and runs Windows 7. Since it is running Windows they have continued on going away from the names with Tablet, Pads and calling them Slate instead. Just like the way the vaporware of Slate from HP, which was announced in 2010 never hit the commercial market. This Slate has 1280x800 IPS LCD, Core i5-470UM processor, 64GB SSD and 4 GB of RAM. It definitely sounds powerful from its specification, but needs to see how much of this power is going to be put to use by the average consumer. More importantly who is the target for this device, as heavy users may need a physical or dedicated keyboard as input device to be productive.

The demo of the device with a capacitive stylus did look impressive, so may be for designers this may be a handy tablet with all that power.

Eee Pad Transformer: $399 - $699: Available in April, 2011

We saw some prototypes for detachable tablets (LePad) from Lenovo and swivel tablets from Dell and in the same lines this transformer device from ASUS has the benefit of physical keyboard and detachable tablet built into it. The caption of Smart Mobility Meets Capable computing says it all. They keyboard acts as a dock in this device and can be snapped off the tablet when required. The demo device was noticed to have a unknown version of Android (Honeycomb?) and with the specification f 10.1 inch 120x00 IPS screen and thinner than iPad, until the next version is launched. It has the NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor that is supposed to give it twice the power of iPad.  This is not running the stock Android though, instead is skinned with a ASUS version called "MyWave". Unlike LePad and other devices that switch OS between docked and undocked mode, this one retains the Android behavior throughout.

Eee Pad Slider: $499 - $799: Available in May, 2011\
This is pretty much same as the Transformer, just that the keyboard is always attached to the tablet and is revealed, when the tablet slides out. The keyboard available is a full QWERTY version for mobile purposes






The release of the Android devices are inline with the releases dates of Honeycomb, that is likely to be around March, 2011.

Source:
Engadget: Source Link
Gizmodo: Source Link