The ASUS Eee Pad Transformer tablet looks very impressive on paper - and on the shelf, with its low price tag - and could be set to embarrass larger rivals if it outsells the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 or Motorola Xoom.
Taiwanese manufacturer ASUS came to prominence as a disruptive force in low-end laptops - well, netbooks - and is now taking its low prices to Android-powered tablets. But this time, ASUS is not going for low power: the Eee Pad has a full 10.1-inch screen, Tegra 2 power, and the very latest, optimized-for-tablets version of Android, dubbed 'Honeycomb'.
Indeed, the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer has almost identical specs (and dimensions) to the Motorola Xoom, but sells for exactly half the price (US$399); it can even humiliate Moto's flagship Atrix 4G smartphone with its so-called Lapdock™ when the Eee Pad is hooked up with its optional laptop dock, making it a first-ever Honeycomb lappie that's more powerful than the Atrix + Lapdock combo. To disrupt things further, ASUS' keyboard accessory is a full two hundred dollars cheaper than Motorola's, yet is actually more useful and versatile.
The only cheaper tablet would be one running Android 2.2 - which is not intended for tablet usage - and with far inferior specs, such as the critically panned Huawei IDEOS S7, replete with its appalling resistive screen and crappy stylus.
So, with Motorola and Samsung unwilling to state how many of their tablets they're actually selling - preferring instead to stress how many they have shipped, which might obscure how many are sitting unsold in warehouses - ASUS now has a killer opportunity to become a surprise second to Apple in the iPad/tablet wars/ How do you fancy ASUS' chances, or the Eee Pad hardware itself?
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