Back during CES earlier this year, we were able to give you guys an early look at ASUS’s Eee Pad MeMo ME171. Kind of an odd tablet, we weren’t quite sure where the 7-inch tablet would fit into the market especially when a more powerful, cheaper, and equal sized ME370T was just around the corner. More recently we’ve learned that plans for the Tegra 3 packing ME370 may have been scrapped in favor of the Nexus tablet giving the ME171 another shot for ASUS to introduce an affordable 7-inch tab.
Well, it looks like ASUS has finally brought the MeMo ME171 to consumers in Taiwan and the fine folks over at NetbookNews were able to pick one up for the low price of $592 (really?) and gave the tablet a complete walkthrough. If you were curious to see some benchmarks and how the tab performed with the outdated, 1.2GHz dual-core S3 processor, you can check out their in depth preview below.
For a device that should have launched a year ago, it’s not too surprising the that the Memo didn’t exactly perform up to snuff. We’re not quite sure if ASUS will follow through with their plans to make the device available here in the states, but let’s hope if they do, they can switch out the aged S3 processor for one of Qualcomm’s fancy new S4’s. If not, I can’t see any reason why someone would pick this device over similar offerings from rival manufacturers.