The Asus Eee Tablet is the slightly odd name for Asus’s new ebook reader. While the Windows 7-packing Eee Pad is aiming to unseat the iPad, the Asus Eee Tablet wants to take on the Amazon Kindle and, according to Asus, neutralise your old school paper notepads too.
Looks can be deceiving: the Asus Eee Tablet appears to be packing a e-ink screen but in fact that’s a backlight-free TFT-LCD screen with 64 levels of grey. Asus reckons that combined with the Eee Tablet’s stylus will make it a super-sensitive note taking device.
The Asus Eee Tablet promises a fast refresh rate and a stonking 2450 dpi input sensitivity so writing and drawing on it should feel almost like putting pen to paper. There’s also a microSD card slot and Wi-Fi and a slightly paltry 2MP camera for capturing images that you can then annotate.
There’s no word on what formats will be supported by the Asus Eee Tablet but its touchscreen counterpart the Asus DR-950 plays nice with PDF, TXT, Audible, MP3, ePub, HTML, JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP. Hopefully the Eee Tablet will be similarly accommodating.
When it comes to battery-life, the Asus Eee Tablet will give you 10 hours of juice for one charge which is not that impressive compared to the days you can squeeze out of the e-ink sporting Kindle. It’s also a a little retro looking compared to Asus’s own OLED-sporting colour screen wonder, the Asus DR570.
But with the skills of a Wacom tablet wedded to an ebook reader, the Asus Eee Tablet could well be tempting for students and professional folk, especially if Asus manages to get it out for the $199 price that’s currently on the cards.
Let us know what you make of the Asus Eee Tablet. Can you see a use for the doodle-enabled tablet?
Due September | £TBC | Asus
