Slate prototypes and possible smartbooks at ASUS

27th January, 2010 by adina
Tags: Asus, News, Smartbooks

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Chairman Jonney Shih has made public the future plans of ASUS and has predicted a successful development of the company. ASUS is developing slate PCs specially designed for multimedia and web use but will not release them until content becomes accessible enough for the users. The content he referred to included music, videos, games and e-book stores. As Shih said, content is currently not attractive enough to the customers and the company will release its products from the labs when the market will be prepared to receive them accordingly.

While big companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple provide online stores with applications and content specially designed for such devices, ASUS will be well prepared to satisfy consumer needs, according to Shih. The company is supposed to work on an Eee Pad of 4 to 7 inches, but with an operating system that is not known yet. Android is expected to provide a ready-made application store but not the content optimized for such a large screen size.

ASUS is also working to prototypes of smartbooks or other devices being slightly larger than a smartphone and having advanced Internet browsing capabilities. With respect to these above mentioned devices, Jonney Shih does not think consumers would be very pleased to adopt quickly new operating systems like Google’s Chrome OS because they are still very familiar with Microsoft’s software after a long period of dominance of this one. However, he agrees that Android, another famous Google product, could soon become the main operating system used in smartbooks and netbooks thanks to its low cost and obvious qualities. Both of them, Android and Chrome, are tested on devices being designed in ASUS laboratories.

Shih also thinks the future will show smaller netbooks and smartbooks that users could wear on their wrist, just like the WaveFace concept recently presented by ASUS. Such devices should have touch, gesture and voice recognition. In his conception, PCs have to become easier to use and more portable instead of becoming more and more powerful.

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