• Tweet

source: Intel.com

Update: Intel has removed the Slider from its web site. Either there was a big mixup or Intel wasn’t supposed to be sharing these details yet. I still have yet to get any explanation from Intel or Asus.

Update 2: Asus says this was a mix up. The Eee Pad Slider will not have an Intel Atom chip, but the company is working on an as-yet unannounced Oak Trail tablet.

Original article: Earlier this week Intel officially launched its new Intel Atom Oak Trail chipset for low power tablets, smartphones, netbooks and other mobile devices, promising that more than 35 products would ship this year with Atom Z670 chips. One of the products featured on Intel’s press page for the Oak Trail platform caught my eye: The Asus Eee Pad Slider.

The Slider is one of four Android tablets Asus unveiled at CES in January. It’s a tablet with a slide-out keyboard which hides behind the display when you’re not using it. The tablet has a 10.1 inch IPS display with a high resolution 1280 x 800 pixel screen and runs Google Android 3.0 Honeycomb. And according to everything I’ve seen up until this week, the plan was to ship the tablet with a 1 GHz NVIDIA Tegra dual core processor. But there it is on the Intel page with a note suggesting the Eee Pad Slider will have an Atom Z670 chip.

I’ve reached out to my contacts at Asus and Intel but so far nobody can tell me what the Slider is doing on the Intel web site. But it’s been three days and nobody’s taken the page down yet either.

The other day Notebook Italia heard that Asus would be launching a hardware update for the Slider later this year. That would mean that the tablet would ship as planned in May, while a second model would be available in September.

Is it possible that the updated version will have an Oak Trail chip? Or did someone at Intel just confuse the Slider with the Samsung Sliding 7 Series tablet, a 10 inch tablet with a similar slide-out keyboard design which will have an Atom Z670 processor and Windows 7 operating system?