The Asus Eee Pad MeMo is a 7 inch Android tablet which Asus first introduced at CES in January. It’s not on the market yet, but Asus plans to show off a new version at the Computex trade show in Taiwan next week, and the company is teasing a new feature that could be some sort of 3D.
A blog post at the Asus TechInStyle.tv web site describes the tablet as an “Eee Pad that jumps out at you.” It’s not clear if that means it will feature a 3D display or 3D cameras and a pair of red and blue glasses for viewing 3D content much as you would with the LG G-Slate.
The Eee Pad MeMo also comes with a stylus, but unlike the HTC Flyer tablet, the MeMo doesn’t have an active digitizer. Instead, the stylus is specially designed to offer pressure-sensitive input on a capacitive touchscreen for writing or drawing on the tablet.
It’s not clear what, if any other specs have changed since Asus first introduced the tablet, but unlike the version shown off earlier this year, the new MeMo will be running Google Android 3.x Honeycomb. It’s expected to have a 1024 x 600 pixel display, a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS and weigh about 0.9 pounds. Asus originally said the tablet would sell for between $499 and $699 and launch in June. I guess we’ll find out next week whether the price and release date still hold.
In other Asus Eee Pad news, the folks at Engadget spotted evidence that the new tablet Asus teased earlier this week may actually be some sort of hybrid device with phone and tablet capabilities — or perhaps a tablet with a detachable phone kind of like the way the Motorola Atrix 4G and Webtop is a laptop with a removable phone (or a phone with an optional laptop accessory.
Merely including a stylus is not enough. They need to design the operating system to actually make use of it so that one can control the device with the stylus instead of just scribbling on screenshots and drawing in a few special apps.
Why is it so difficult to implement something that was the norm on PDAs 10 years ago?
“…the stylus is specially designed to offer pressure-sensitive input on a capacitive touchscreen for writing or drawing on the tablet.”
Oh yeah? After all of the different models of capacitive writing instruments which have come out, how is theirs going to be any “different”. Maybe if the sensors in the display were more dense, we wouldn’t need fat tipped pens, which are no more than extensions of a finger.