Steve Jobs’ announcement on the stage at the launching of iPad has brought up the euphoria of inevitable product line-up of tablet, tablet, and many more tablets in this year’s Computex expo in Taipei. If there’s a competitive vendor trying to counter the popular iPad with its own modified product, Asus, Taiwan’s largest netbook manufacturers is absolutely the first one who do it. Asus has been passionately promoting their own Eee tablet netbook for months. Now they’re coming thorugh this new market layer of tablets with two different products: the Asus EeePad and the Asus Eee Tablet.
The EeePad comes in two types: the 12-inch EP21 and the tinier 10-inch EP101-TC. The EP121 features a CULV Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a webcam, USB port, Windows 7 and an iPad-caliber battery life of up to 10 hours. The retail prices are predicted somewhere between $399 and $499, but this is still a concept-product that still needs more time to hit the market: Asus doesn’t expect it to ship until the first quarter of the next year. Clearly, Apple has got the upper hand in selecting the earlier launching time.
Then here comes Eee Tablet. Strangely, it’s not a tablet per se, but an e-reader (raising an interesting question for Asus: why not just call it Eee Reader?) Sporting a 64-level gray scale LCD (not e-ink) display capable of a resolution of 1024×768 and 2450 dpi input sensitivity, it’s an ideal device for taking notes or making doodles. The Eee Tablet…
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