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Asustek is tablet happy, and one of those tabs will have Android inside next March. CEO Jerry Shen said Asustek’s not yet named Android tablet offering would be the third product in their Eee Pad line, and would retail for $399. Shen spoke with reporters after Asustek’s second quarter earnings conference.
At present Asustek has over 800 software engineers working on Android, but in their smartphone division. Shen plans to transfer some of them to the tablet division. Asustek has teamed up with Garmin in producing Android smartphones centered on their GPS and navigation abilities.
The first planned Eee Pad product will be a 12 inch tablet with a docking station that turns it into a laptop computer, expected to retail for $1,000 with a December or January launch date. Also launching in January would be a 10 inch tablet without the docking station, with an expected retail of $399-$499. Both would have Windows 7, albeit different flavors of the Microsoft OS.
IntoMobile asks if a March 2011 launch means the Android Eee Pad would ship with Android 3.o (Gingerbread). There’s plenty of tablets being released before March, so let’s see then if they can make it stand out. Apple should be releasing their iPad before then, and that’s the tablet everyone is going to compare themselves to.