Asus has officially announced its Eee Pad Transformer tablet for the international market. The tablet, which comes with a keypad docking station that transforms it into a netbook, will be available in Europe within the coming weeks.
In India we have to wait till June. The tablet has been priced below $500 (about Rs 22,500), which means it costs about as much as an iPad. The Asus tablet beats the iPad in terms of specifications as well.
The tablet has an Nvidia Tegra, 2.1 GHz, dual core CPU with 1080p high definition video playback capability and 1GB of RAM. It runs on Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system and is supported by 16 hours of battery life (9.5 hours in tablet mode and 16 hours when docked in a keyboard).
The tablet has a 5 Megapixel camera at the back and a 1.3 megapixel camera on the front for video chats. Other goodies include two USB ports, dual card reader and HDMI port.
Eee Pad has a 10.1 inch 1280 x 800 pixel capacitive touchscreen, IPS (in plane switching) panel with 175 degree viewing angle, and is protected by scratch resistant glass.
Asus also offers unlimited web storage for one year. You can use this space for songs, video and any other stuff that you can stream to your machine when you’re online. The drawback is that if you’ve uploaded your entire music collection on Asus’ server, you’ll have to pay for a lot of storage space once the year of free usage ends.
For music lovers Asus has included SRS premium sound with 3D stereo capability and max bass response.
The tablet supports Flash 10.2 as well as HTML 5, so it supports practically all web pages.
For connectivity there is only Wifi right now, but by the time the tablet is launched in India there will be a 3G option as well. GPS technology is built into every Eee Pad.
The tablet is loaded with Polaris Office 3.0, a professional mobile office solution that enables users to edit various types of office documents including Word (.doc), spreadsheets (.xls) and presentation (.ppt) files.
The best part of the deal is its price, which will be about how much the iPad 2 costs in India, or starting at about Rs 30,000, which is competitive for a device that boasts great specs and functionality.
Asus is also set to launch a few other tablets at a starting price of Rs 20,000 and a new range of smartphones based on both Android and Windows platforms. There are no details as of now but the new arrivals will start showing up after the end of June.