Asus EeePad Leak & Photo

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5 May 2010 One Comment

Asus has made a breakthrough to compete with Apple iPad. The iPad competitor that made by Asus is called Asus EeePad and ready to launch in June and Asus ready to release the Asus EeePad in July 2010. The Asus EeePad use Android as operating system and it has price about USD $ 479 – $ 510. Unfortunately, there is no exact information about the Asus EeePad, but Asus has an estimation about the total shipments reach up to 300,000 units during 2010. Let’s wait and see the progress.

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One Comment »

Eric Baird said:

I like the idea of having five buttons (like the old Palm devices!), but I’m not so keen on them being round. That seems to be a nod to Apple. You’re not supposed to be looking at the buttons, you’re supposed to be looking at the screen.

From a tactile point of view, rectangular buttons would be easier to feel, and the angled edges would convey more information by touch than round ones. Rectangle-strip buttons would also be easier to find by touch if you wanted to page through an ebook than these little round things (notice the large button surfaces on most ebooks). So these little round things seem to suggest an “Appleish” “style over functionality”. People who want Apple iPads can already buy them, this is supposed to be aimed at the //other// people.

OTOH … Is the centre button a joystick nubbin? If so, possibly a nod to Palm (which is a good thing), the Palm devices’ centre button had “up” and “down” edges for cursor control. If this is a four-way, that’d be even better (especially since the device operates in portrait or landscape orientation, so that “up/down” kinda requires a different two microswitches for each alignment, which means that you end up with a four-way nubbin anyway).

Also not terribly keen on what appears in the pics to be a silver backplate. Again, it’s suggestive of the device being a derivative of the iPad rather than a separate device in its own right. Since this is supposed to be distancing itself from the iPad and presenting itself as a proper “workhorse” tablet (and not just an iPad ripoff), I’d have preferred a simple understated black or grey backplate. You don’t look at the back when you’re using it. Ideally this is going to be something that business people can take out of their bag and quietly use on the train without cringing with embarrassment or being worried that they’ll get mugged. This is supposed to be for doing work or playing media, it’s not supposed to be blingy jewelry.

Apart from the button shape, I like the front view. I’m in the market for a tablet-format netbook, and I hope that this’ll be it.

I hope that ASUS realise that a lot of us just want them to provide the hardware, and don’t want some fancy custom “experience”, like they attempted to provide with the version of Linux that they included with the PC900 (the PC900 runs much better with standard Ubuntu).

This machine SHOULD be a sure-fire success. About the only way that ASUS could mess this up would be if they installed some other silly proprietary platform on it in an attempt to copy Apple, instead of just making sure that the drivers all work well with other people’s software, and that the thing is as open as possible.
When ASUS brew up “special” OS versions like SplashTop and the PC900 Linux, people often don’t like using them. Other people do that stuff better. What we need from ASUS is the hardware and the drivers, and compatibility.

When Microsoft had an OS that people liked (XP), and tried to make their next product emulate Apple’s we ended up with the appalling mess that was Vista. I hope that ASUS realise that a lot of people actually like ASUS hardware, and I hope they don’t try to bend their design instincts to make the thing more like the iPad. The iPad already exists, this machine needs to carve out its own independent niche, just like the ASUS netbooks did.

If it runs Ubuntu or XP, I’ll have one. It it runs some funny proprietary thing, I probably won’t.

# 21 May 2010 at 6:47 am