ASUS gets Computex 2011 started early with a tablet teaser
Oh ASUS, what are you up to now? The company that brought us the wildly popular Eee Pad Transformer has another new tablet brewing in its design labs, which we're promised we'll get to witness for the first time at Computex 2011.
Context & Ripple Effects
ASUS has turned pre-show teasers into a habit: the company teased the Eee Pad and Eee Slate ahead of CES in December 2010, then followed through by shipping the Eee Pad Transformer — its first real entry into mobile tablets — as an Android 3.0 slate with a keyboard dock in March 2011. That device quickly became its tablet beachhead, with ASUS issuing an official statement on Transformer shortages by early May and commentary crediting its price-to-features ratio.
The new teaser lands amid two unconfirmed reports from DigiTimes coverage: that ASUS is planning a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 tablet alongside yet another Intel-based slate. A second Computex-stage reveal would confirm the cadence — tease before the show, unveil on the floor — that ASUS established at CES.
First-order effects
- ASUS gets a headline slot at Computex 2011 before the show opens, extending momentum from the Eee Pad Transformer while demand still outstrips supply per its own shortage statement.
- Attendees and press get their first look at an unnamed successor, putting pressure on rivals like Motorola, Samsung, and Acer to match any reveal with their own Computex announcements.
Second-order effects
- If the teased tablet matches the rumored Tegra 3 spec, NVIDIA gains a marquee design win to anchor quad-core positioning against competing ARM chips, while the separately rumored Intel slate would keep Intel's tablet push alive inside ASUS's lineup.
- A faster follow-on to the Transformer forces keyboard-dock competitors to defend the hybrid form factor ASUS popularized, likely compressing prices across Android 3.x tablets.
Third-order effects
- ASUS is institutionalizing the show-tease-then-unveil cycle, using rapid tablet iteration to convert a netbook-era brand into a credible mobile contender — a pattern other PC makers will need to copy or cede ground on.
- Sustained shortages plus a widening roadmap suggest tablet component allocation is becoming the bottleneck that determines which vendors can ship multiple Android slates per year.
The trend: PC vendors are shifting from annual product cycles to show-driven tablet sprints, with ASUS's transformer-style hybrids and NVIDIA's silicon roadmaps setting the competitive tempo.