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ASUS Eee Pad EP101TC getting Tegra 2 treatment ahead of March launch?
More from DigiTimes this morning and its chatty sources within NVIDIA and Taiwanese supply chains. First up is talk that ASUS' 10-inch Eee Pad -- presumably, the Android loving EP101TC said to cost less than $399 -- will launch in March of 2011 with NVIDIA's Tegra 2 taking care of the processing duties. DigiTimes' sources also remind us that Tegra 2 tablets are on the way from Dell, Samsung, MSI, and Toshiba in addition to smartphones from ASUS, Motorola, and LG. Good to know, but for as long as Tegra 2 has been discussed, we've yet to see the SoC ship inside anything worth getting too excited over. And don't even mention the Boxee Box, they switched to Intel at the last minute, remember? Maybe Dell's Looking Glass tablet will change all that when it launches any day now.
ASUS prices 10-inch Android Eee Pad under $399, 8-inch Eee Tablet at $300, other tablets too
ASUS just dumped Windows Embedded Compact 7 for Android for its lower-end tablet devices, and CEO Jerry Shen is passing along the savings. He's pledging that the 10-inch Eee Pad EP101TC, due to ship in March, will cost under $399 -- and if the Notion Ink Adam is any indication that means it'll be $398. Then there's the EP121, a 12-inch tablet running Windows 7 that's positioned rather higher up in the market, as indicated by its $1,000 price tag. Shen says this high cost is due to that docking station able to intriguingly transform it into a laptop when it ships around December or January. Next is yet another Eee Pad due around January, one that will run Windows Embedded Compact 7 on a 10-inch screen and at a price somewhere south of $499. Finally, there's the grayscale Eee Tablet e-reader thing, formerly rumored to be under $599 but now priced at a solid $300 and, supposedly, shipping in October. Surely we're mere months away from tablet saturation at this point.
ASUS Eee Pad EP101TC opts for Android, dumps Windows Embedded Compact 7
The lesser of ASUS' two Eee Pad tablets announced at Computex this year, the EP101TC, is getting itself a software rejig ahead of its planned early 2011 launch. Originally slated to run on Microsoft's Windows Embedded Compact 7 -- a wordy OS, if nothing else -- the Pad will now entrust its operational infrastructure to Google's Android. ASUS is currently working on prototypes with Froyo on board, but Gingerbread (or Android 3.0) has not been ruled out as a possible final OS choice. We're told to expect the first public demos at CES 2011, with retail units likely following on from there at a relatively brisk pace.
ASUS Eee Pad EP101TC and EP121 preview
At long last, the ASUS Eee Pads have arrived, but unfortunately they're just not working the way we've been imagining for all these months. We got a few minutes to toy around with the 10-inch EP101TC and 12-inch EP121, but both were barely working. And "barely" is being gracious. We can tell you that both models are incredibly well built -- they've got aluminum edges and matte back covers -- and neither was particularly heavy. The EP121 wasn't booting at all, but it was being shown off with a super sleek keyboard docking station, which will be used to turn the tablet into an ultraportable laptop of sorts. An NVIDIA Tegra-powered EP101TC was powering on, but its Windows Embedded Compact 7-based interface was still noticeably buggy, and the touchscreen quite unresponsive. The UI certainly looked attractive enough, and our swipe motions across the capacitive touchscreen were handled admirably, but ASUS definitely has a ways to go in terms of functionality. We wish we had more impressions to share, but it looks as if we'll have to wait for a less half-baked iteration to really dive in. 'Til then, feel free to peruse the gallery below and peek the video just beyond the break.%Gallery-93960%
