Ever since the ASUS Transformer was released at 399$ for a 16GB model, that pretty much became the price to beat for a tablet which wanted to compete with the iPad2
Which can only mean that ASUS really botched the PR on this one. Neither Engadget nor Gizmodo (arguably the two largest gadget sites) have reviewed it, but the few reviews I did find were generally positive.
I've read about tablets from Motorola, Toshiba, and Samsung, but nothing about the ASUS, which looks to be a decent, relatively cheap Honeycomb tablet.
I wonder if Asus just didn't send review units to Engadget and Gizmodo. OTOH, isn't the press supposed to be covering things on their own??
It's going to be interesting to see how the HP Touchpad & Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 do in the next few months. However, the real competition will start when Amazon jumps into the market with their rumored Kal-El tablets later this year.
They need something more to compete if they don't want it to be a race to the bottom with Chinese, Taiwanese, and South Korean vendors.
For as long as the MS/Windows ecosystem is a going concern, a sufficiently well executed non-Apple tablet will have a market in those who are anti-Apple.
The only way to beat them is to attack from below. Make a tablet that is only good for browsing the web. Maybe add a few cheap features like a camera and GPS, but skimp on expensive features like storage.
If you really want to be cool, add some kind of console controls, so teenagers can play games. Maybe even add some sort of social element - allow them to connect to each other through USB, and play arcade games.
Or attack some other niche that Apple don't own. You could add a bunch of graphics calculator functions, and target students. Just be careful you don't do anything that a $3 App won't do.
Price it at half the price of an iPad, and hope you gain a toehold.
Like the iPhone and it's $600 starting price?
[1] http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/TouchSystems/Tou... [2] http://www.pdapanache.com/stylusfaq.asp
The fundamental idea of the iPad is that you don't need something else to make it work. It isn't that you mustn't use something else.
[2] http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0,2542,t=touch+screen... - "A display screen that is sensitive to the touch of a finger or stylus."
Oh wait, because it doesn't suit your purposes either.
See: The surprise in this thread being expressed that Asus' tablet has been available for sale for months.
Certainly they've already spent quite a lot - trade shows, etc - and have the geek faithful aware of the tablet already. It'd be much easier for me to evangelize this at a lower price point.
A $299 price point would rock. "Correct, it doesn't do as much as an iPad, but it's also not as expensive."
This notion that "the market says $499 price points are what tablets should be priced at" is stupid. $499 is what iPads will sell at - no one else has yet demonstrated that a $499 is viable for any other tablet than the iPad. I will say it's foolish to keep trying this late in the game. If a company as big as HP isn't willing to do what it takes to get these in to peoples' hands (which may include selling below cost), there's little hope this will be a viable competitor.
Is this in part due to the plethora of crappy Android tablets that came out in the last year?