Asus lays out plans for Android, Windows 7 tablets

October 29, 2010 7:32 AM
Devindra Hardawar
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MobileBeat 2013
July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA
Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Computer manufacturer Asus will finally launch its tablets starting in December, the company’s president Jerry Shen told news site Digitimes.

We’ve been reporting on Asus’s nebulous tablet plans since March, with the latest report landing in August, but now it seems like things are finally beginning to coalesce. The company will launch its 12-inch Windows 7-powered device first in December (the Eee Pad EP121, which Shen previously said would retail around $1,000 with a keyboard dock), and will follow that up with two 7-inch tablets and two 9-inch tablets in March 2011.

One of the 7-inch models will only have WiFi, while the other will features 3.5G mobile broadband capabilities. As for the 9-inch tablets, one will be an Android device running Nvidia’s Tegra 2 mobile processor, while the other will run a Windows platform (which may be the Windows Embedded Compact 7 device Asus previously mentioned). The 9-inch models will have a price gap of $100 — previous pricing listed the Android model at $399 and the Windows model at $499.

The company is shoring up its tablet manufacturing operations by transferring 200 technicians (out of 800) from its handheld device department to support tablet research and development. The company plans to release a 9-inch ebook reader soon, and its previously-announced 8-inch Eee Note is now aiming for a November release.

  • Crowd_Sorcerer

    This device reminds me of the HTC HD2 phone, released last year running Window Mobile 6.5.Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform was designed to be used with a stylus pen, and not a capacitive multitouch screen. HTC got this old OS and put a new interface on top. HTC's interface worked well with multitouch, but underneath, you'd always find Microsoft's old OS, full of menus that were difficult to use with multitouch.The HD2 was also full of old apps that didn't work with multitouch. For example, Microsoft's own Excel was useless, as when swiping across a row of cells with a stylus pen, you could select those cells. However, doing the same on a multitouch device caused the whole page to flip away. The only way to select cells on the HD2 was to go through each one manually.The gadget magazines described Windows Mobile 6.5 as “lipstick on a pig.”Now Microsoft is doing it again, putting its desktop OS onto a multitouch slate. Yes, Windows 7 can technically now use multitouch. But no, it is not a good user experience. Microsoft can add pinch-to-zoom as an afterthought, but sooner or later you're going to get into interface mismatches. It isn't going to work.

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