Asus Padfone With Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich And Transformer Prime Quad-Core Tablet Release Date Is Early 2012

The AsiaD conference has begun several days ago and many companies spoke about their future plans including Samsung and Asus. We’re going to focus on the latter as the Chairman of Asus has officially revealed that the company has big plans for 2012. The first big news of 2012 is the ASUS Padfone, a smartphone that will be powered by Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
Until recently Asus hasn’t officially recognized the existence of the Padfone, but we’ve caught the device in action earlier this year. Shortly after that, the Padfone was revealed and we knew that it will be a tablet-phone combination as you can connect the smartphone to an Asus slate and get along with your work.
The Asus Padfone will work in a similar way as the Motorola Atrix 4G which features several interesting docks including a laptop dock and a multimedia dock. While we knew that the Padfone will feature a 5-megapixel camera, and that the tablet can be used as an external battery, we didn’t know whether it will run on Android Ice Cream Sandwich.
Asus is probably the first company that announces plans to release an Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich device, as HTC has admitted that it’s reviewing its Android plans and will announce “something” shortly.
Moving on to the next ASUS announcement, we find Jonney Shih revealing the world’s first quad-core tablet running on Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. It’s called Asus Transformer Prime tablet and it will feature a 10-inch touchscreen, quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, SD card slot, HDMI out port, and a battery which will last 14-and-a-half hours.
The Asus Transformer Prime release date is November 9th during a special event that will be held by the company. One of the most important aspects of the Transformer Prime tablet is the 8.3mm thickness as it will only run on Android 3.0 Honeycomb at launch. It’s unknown whether it will be upgradeable to Android 4.0 ICS though we can’t find any reasons why it won’t support it.
Jonney Shih also confirmed that existing Asus Android tablets will receive Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 by the end of 2011. The Chairman expects the rollout to begin in the last month of the year, but he hinted that if things go well, then ICS will arrive “earlier.”
Last, but not least ASUS’ Chairman spoke about netbooks. What, you didn’t think that they were dead, right? Asus is planning ultra-portable netbooks that will also be very thin. They might be called Zenbooks and when Mr. Shih asked who’s the competition, he responded the MacBook Air. So, Asus will release netbooks that are thinner than Apple’s laptop.

Posted in: tablet technology