Asus may be more deserving of HTC’s ‘Quietly Brilliant’ slogan – the Taiwanese company has a track record as an innovator that stretches back several years, has invented product categories and continues to meet its rivals with ever more ingenious solutions, but it simply doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.
In 2008, Asus launched the Eee PC, a diminutive laptop with a child-proof operating system, a decent battery life and a price point of just under £200. It called this tiny machine a netbook, and it kick-started an entire market.
Acer, Toshiba, Samsung, Dell and everybody else jumped on the success of the Eee PC, rushing to get their own netbooks onto store shelves and capitalise on Asus’ genius. More and more people wanted a laptop with the growth of social networking, but consumers had less cash to throw about due to a steadily worsening economy.
Whether Asus had predicted that trend or not, the fact was that it gambled on a brand new form factor for the personal computer, and it paid off in a big way.
The only hardware company I can think of that’s managed to invent a product category in quite the same way is Apple, and it’s almost ironic that the device that did it was the same one that killed the netbook.
When the iPad launched, it did so to a hugely mixed reaction. Some heralded it as the future of computing it no doubt turned out to be, some claimed it to be nothing but ‘a big iPod Touch’.
Both opinions are right, in the same way that the netbook is nothing but ‘a small laptop’ but the real tell of innovation is in the sales figures – such criticism didn’t stop either from selling in huge numbers.
So the netbook died – thanks in part to poor profit margins and ropey processors – and the tablet came to the fore. Such is the relentless march of progress. There can only ever be one initiator in each of these cycles, and in the time of the tablets it’s Apple.
But every time a new kind of product comes out, the really interesting thing to watch for is what the rivals do next. You only become an initiator, and you don’t advance the world of technology, if you don’t do the same thing that everyone else is doing.
What I mean is this: When Asus invented the netbook, nearly all other manufacturers made identikit clones of the Eee PC – even Sony, a company traditionally a tier above such ‘budget’ machines. But Apple didn’t.
Apple never bothered to get involved in netbooks because it knew that the way to move things along was to create something new. The iPad soon took over the netbook as the mobile computer du jour, and once again all of the tech industry’s main manufacturers began their trend of pumping out copies that – to this day – do little to differentiate themselves. Except Asus.
Asus returned to its drawing board to figure out what it could do that would represent a real alternative to the iPad. It came back with the Asus EeePad Slider and the Asus Eee Pad Transformer. The Slider was a solid product but it took a while to come to market and eventually lost its place in the world due to that.
Read the Asus Eee Pad Transformer review
The Transformer, however, was a real breath of fresh air. It was the perfect example of how you take what a rival has done, mix it in with what you know how to do and come back at them with a product offering more than anyone else. How do you differentiate from a hundred different Android tablets? By being the one that doubles as a laptop.
The newly-launched Transformer Prime only goes further to hone this innovation by slimming the thing down while also speeding it up. For my money, it’s the only thing on the market that a the average tablet buyer should look at other than the iPad.
CES 2012 this week has only confirmed my suspicions; it’s been a show remarkable only for the sheer volume of waterproof tablets and little else.
But Asus’ innovation doesn’t stop there. The Asus Padfone is going to be officially launched at Mobile World Congress next month. The concept – a tablet shell and battery that you slot a phone into – makes perfect sense.
You never need to use a tablet and a phone at the same time, so why not just make a phone powerful enough to act as both when required?
I like it in the same way that I like the idea of the Motorola Atrix Lapdock, but I have faith in Asus to see it through with more precision that Moto’s sluggish webtop experience. I’m sure the Padfone will be a real treat to use, even if it doesn’t sell as many as the company hopes it will.
And therein lies my point: I fear that Asus isn’t selling as many of these top products as it deserves to. The Transformer Prime deserves to shift just as many units as the iPad, but it probably won’t. Instead, everyone waits with baited breath for the iPad 3, while everybody else unveils, sells and eventually forgets about a billion other tablets with nothing in the way of innovation. With no spark.
Asus’ bizarre experiment with origami laptops
I don’t own a tablet and I’ve no intention of buying one, but if I find myself in the need for a readily portable web device that’s truly versatile, I’d be very inclined to buy a Transformer Prime. To me, Asus is at the very forefront of innovative, experimental product design, and it’s managed to stay there without too often diverting down ‘what the hell is this?’ alley.
I just wish more people realised that. It must be hard being that kind of company, when you live in world populated by people who are barely aware that non-iPad tablets actually exist. It may well be the case that if it weren’t for Asus and its netbooks, there wouldn’t be an iPad.
In an ideal world, we’ll be able to say that ‘if it wasn’t for the Transformer Prime or the Padfone’ then we’d never have whatever might be around the corner next.
As it is, I fear that we’ll be watching CES 2013 looking at more 10-inch waterproof tablets, while an underselling Asus beats its heads against a the nearest wall.
