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Asus has a habit of introducing products long before they’re ready to ship — but more often than not, they do actually ship. The company introduced a 13 inch tablet/notebook hybrid called the Transformer Book in June, 2012. Now it’s finally ready to go on sale… at least in Japan.

The Transformer Book is a Windows 8 notebook with a detachable tablet section… or a Windows 8 tablet that can be used with a keyboard base, depending on how you look at it.

It goes on sale in Japan this week for about $1280. That price covers a model with 4GB of RAM, a 128GB solid state disk, a 1920 x 1080 pixel display, and an Intel Core i5 processor. And that’s just in the tablet.

When you plug in the keyboard dock you also get an extra battery for longer run time and a 500GB hard drive for extra storage. Unfortunately even with both batteries, Asus is only promising up to 6 hours of run time (the tablet alone should get up to 5).

Asus also plans to offer a higher-end model with a Core i7 processor. That model was briefly up for pre-order from at least one US retailer for nearly $1500, but the product page has since been pulled.

via Engadget