Asus introduced the Eee Pad Slider at CES in January, but the company’s been pretty quite about the Android tablet with a slide-out keyboard ever since. Now Asus is promising that the Slider will launch soon.
The company has posted a few teaser photos of the tablet on TechInStyle.tv, but there are no big surprises. While the company says the tablet has gone through additional testing since January, the only major change I can see is that the mockups show Android 3.x Honeycomb rather than Android 2.2 Froyo.
The tablet is expected to have a 1 GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor and a 10.1 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display. There’s no word on pricing, but Asus will have more details during a pre-Computex news conference on May 30th.
You can check out my demo video from CES showing how the sliding mechanism works after the break. In a nutshell, the Slider is a lot like the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, except that instead of offering an optional keyboard docking station, the Slider come standard with a keyboard that’s always with you since it tucks away behind the screen.
hmmm, i understand your hesitance, but honestly, this looks great, especially if they can keep the keyboard thin enough. this looks like the first feasible option for me to bring around, given how much emails i type. and even if they do not get it thin enough THIS time round, i think they might be able to do it the next time round 😉
Hmm, I always enjoy new form factors but… This is going to be a product I’d need to see and handle to get excited about. Having never seen one in person, I’m concerned about the weight of the keyboard and slider. In that regard the Transformer seems like a much better option, since it lets you do most of the things you’d need a laptop for, but pop the screen off whenever you don’t need the keyboard to cut the weight down. Because you can’t remove the keyboard on this, and honestly you don’t need a keyboard all that often on a tablet…
I don’t know, it seems like this is treading towards the worst of all worlds territory where you have highly limited function as a laptop, and a less than optimal tablet experience because of the weight and form factor.
We’ll see, but I don’t have a good feeling about this product.