ASUS Eee Pad Transformer On Sale April 26th for $399/$499; Thumbs Nose at Motorola

[dgstorm]

In only five days you will be able to get your hands on the new ASUS Eee Pad Transformer, and the pricing that we reported earlier turns out to be correct. ASUS effectively makes faces, and wiggles their rear-end at Motorola and Apple with their super-aggressive pricing model. You can get the 16GB Eee Pad Transformer for only $399 bucks, or the 32GB model for $499. To put it in perspective, here is a recap of the device's specs below:

• 10.1-inch wide-view angle 178 degree 1280×800 IPS display
• 16/32GB solid state drive
• Dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor
• 1GB of RAM
• HDMI out
• "Up to" 9.5 hours of battery life
• Android 3.0 (Honeycomb)

Even though it's cheaper, it looks pretty much just as juicy as the Moto Xoom, but... oh yeah... you can also get a keyboard dock with additional built-in battery for this puppy later on for only $150 bucks. With a single shot fired, ASUS kicks off the tablet-wars with a real bang, and "raises the bar" for the entire tablet industry. It'll be an interesting summer for tablet technology.

Source: AndroidTablets.net via Android.net and ASUS

 

[Beardface]

Yep... if this thing starts outselling the Xoom, which it could if its being sold at BestBuy, then look out. You're going to see some good devices coming out in the near future that will be noticeably cheaper than the Xoom.

And I think the keyboard dock for the tablet might be the way of the future, and could likely be what dooms the laptop market. Undock it for browsing, presentations, etc, but dock it if you want to do any heavy computing or intense gameplaying through the additional high end processors in the keyboard dock.

 

[jaycemiskel]

A tablet manufacturer that gets it, thank you God! I wonder what all those people saying that the Xoom wasn't overpriced think about this.

 

[Diab210]

I have been having a hard time debating on if I wanted to take the plunge on a Honeycomb tablet but... at $400 that thing is quite tempting.

 

[GeLopez]

oh man i have to go check my pants, this is great news. i want this, and i want this now.

ps motorola can keep their xoom. eee transformer is the way to go.

 

[Big Lou]

Wow, after the complete embarrassment that was the Xoom, we finally have a flagship device we can be proud of! This looks amazing!

 

[JeffDenver]

Not to pee on anyone's parade, but I am not seeing any mention of a slot for SD expansion on that thing.

Even the 16 gig Xoom is expandable to 48 gigs.

 

[ColinZack]

Does this have any type of overlay on top of honeycomb, or is it vanilla?

 

[Diab210]

Not to pee on anyone's parade, but I am not seeing any mention of a slot for SD expansion on that thing.

Even the 16 gig Xoom is expandable to 48 gigs.

as far as i can tell it has a microsd card slot

 

[Mopdaddy]

I'm buying it.

 

[Mopdaddy]

Actually I'm buying 2 b.c my father hates his netbook.

 

[dfuser312553]

... if someone gets this to dual boot ubuntu I'm sold.

 

[JeffDenver]

I found the specs page:

Asus Eee Pad Transformer Full Specifications And Price Details - Gadgetian

So it has multiple SD slots actually, not just one. Anyone know how far the memory is expandable to? Can you put 32 gig cards in all those slots if you want?

 

[GrillMouster]

It's great to see PC manufacturers jumping into the Android tablet world and showing phone manufacturers how it's done.

 

[Big Lou]

Not to pee on anyone's parade, but I am not seeing any mention of a slot for SD expansion on that thing.

Even the 16 gig Xoom is expandable to 48 gigs.

Not only does this have "an" SD card slot, but it has two. There is a MicroSD card on the pad itself and a full-sized SD card on the dock.

Does this have any type of overlay on top of honeycomb, or is it vanilla?

Vanilla honeycomb!

Also, I found this fantastic review/preview (2 parts) of the Transformer. This thing is pure sex:

[video=youtube;bvxth_Sxfps]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvxth_Sxfps]YouTube - eee pad transformer home review Asus[/video]