A pair of 10 inch and 12 inch Windows-powered tablets take the stage at Taiwan’s Computex 2010 techfest, along with a concept digital notetaker/ereader.
Computex 2010 | Asus has made its much-anticipated entry into the booming slate space – making it the first of the PC vendors to launch a response to Apple’s iPad, and certainly not the last. All three slates are a little light on details but the most iPad-like appears to be the 10 inch Eee Pad (below).
Unveiling the tablet triple-play at today’s Asus pre-Computex press conference in Taiwan, company chairman Jonney Shih described the 10 incher as a device for “casual computing”.
Asus’ approach to sharing the specs is also rather casual – all we know is that under the 10 inch multitouch panel lurks Windows Embedded Standard 7.
This cut-down version of Windows 7 breaks the monolithic desktop OS down into a series of Lego-like components which licensees can plug together, including installing almost any Windows 7 desktop component (such as Internet Explorer 8, Windows Media Player 12 and Silverlight 3) as a plug-in module.
The footprint can be as small as 40MB with a bootable kernel, making WES7 ideal for devices with minimal storage space and system memory.
Asus has bolted its own slick UI atop the barebones OS, although a source let slip that this was developed in partnership with Microsoft and that Redmond may have done a lot of the heavy lifting, due to the likelihood that the Eee Pad could become a poster child for Windows Embedded and Windows slates as a whole.
Asus calls out the key physical specs as an ultra-slim 12.2 mm profile with the scales barely wobbling at 675 grams. We don’t know what chip powers the 10 inch slate – it’s perhaps significant that Asus did not call it out as being Intel silicon, not even the latest Atom ‘Moorestown’ platform.
Asus has set a target price of US$399-$499 but the device isn’t due to launch until the first quarter of 2011. Yes, it’s that long away – allowing Apple time for at least one more revision to the iPad and plenty of room for others such as HP and Dell to grab a piece of the slate action.
A larger 12 inch version of the Eee Pad (above) takes a more traditional PC-centric approach, running Windows 7 Home Premium on an Intel ultra-low voltage Core 2 Duo processor with an alleged 10+ hours battery life. This makes it more like an ultralite notebook which ditches the keyboard for a touchscreen.
Asus will also offer a compact desktop docking station with a slim cordless keyboard as well as a notebook shell into which the Eee Pad slides to become a more conventional ULV netbook complete with keyboard.
While Asus tags the 10 incher as a “supplementary Windows-based portable tablet PC” the 12 inch model is spruiked as “a full-featured slate computer”.
Shih rounded out the trio with a third and even more mysterious device – the Eee Tablet. Positioned as a ‘digital notepad’ as well as an ebook reader, the Eee Tablet has an 8 inch mono LCD screen with stylus input. Asus says the screen supports input sensitivity of 2,50 dpi for a realistic ink-like response from the stylus.
The device also features a 2.0 megapixel camera and MicroSD card slot with Windows synchronisation via USB, although we don’t know what OS this runs or what processor is behind it.
Asus sees the target market for the Eee Tablet digital notepad as ranging from students to mobile business professionals and has tagged it for a September release at US$199-$299.
David Flynn is visiting Computex 2010 in Taipei as a guest of Intel.