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ASUS CEO: netbooks will outsell tablets, Eee Pad to run 'Microsoft software'

ASUS CEO Jerry Shen sure is making the rounds this week talking up the company's upcoming entry into the tablet arena, but before giving up some more Eee Pad details he clarified that he doesn't anticipate tablet sales surpassing that of netbooks. The latter category is for personal computing while tablets are based on consuming content and Cloud computing. Shen said something similar when we spoke with him at CeBIT, but this time he also added that without Apple the tablet category would have been slower to ramp up. We'd say he's on the money with that one, but still he plans to launch an Eee tablet in early June at Computex. And though he mentioned there being a few versions, he revealed the "first phase will use Microsoft software." We don't know if that means the tablet will be Intel powered and run Windows 7, or pack a Tegra 2 processor and boot some version of Windows CE like we saw at CES. Regardless of what happens, we'd say Microsoft's happy to hear this all after this week's news.