ASUS bringing a pair of Nexus-like tablets to CES?
ASUS has surely enjoyed its relationship with Google to create the official 7 inch Nexus tablet, but the company still has more tricks of its own to show off in the world of Android tablets. Rumors regarding devices from the Transformer line of tablets have been unusually scarce, but perhaps that’s because ASUS has fallen in love with the 7 inch book-like slates they’ve worked on lately.
One of those leaked tablets was only in the form of a list of specs, but we do get a sample camera shot to behold. That tablet is the ASUS ME371MG. It’s a 7 inch slate that bears a striking resemblance to the Nexus 7, though the internals are quite different. This device will reportedly use Intel’s Atom chipset for its computing needs, specifically the Z2420. The base spec on this thing is a 1.2GHz single-core configuration that doesn’t sound amazing in the world of multi-core chipsets but should be able to hold its own.
The display is said to have a 1280×800 resolution, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth are to be expected, of course, but this thing is also said to house 3G radios. The sample image above looks to have been taken at about 3.1 megapixels, but there’s no telling if that’s the max resolution of the device’s camera just yet.
Also confirmed was the ASUS ME172V. This particular device is a bit more modest than the one you read about above. It’s a 7 inch slate itself, but comes outfitted with VIA’s 1GHz single-core WM8950, an ARM Cortex-A9 chipset which houses Mali-400 graphics.
The 7 inch panel on it uses TN technology instead of IPS, and also has only 1024×600 resolution, and looks to have just a 1.3 megapixel camera sitting on the front. Both of these tablets will launch with Jelly Bean 4.1 and we’re sure ASUS has something in mind for a custom user interface to sit on top of that.
We imagine these will be quite affordable as the specs don’t hold even the smallest candle to the Nexus 7, but ASUS has obviously fallen in love with the 7 inch design they started with Google’s line and will look to carry that design philosophy across what seems to be its new favorite category of slates.
These devices — the latter coming in both black and white — are said to be getting their unveiling come CES so we’ll be right there to get our eyes on both if that turns out to be true. And we wouldn’t write ASUS off as far as more exciting products — the OEM always seems to have something more up its sleeve for the biggest technology event of the new year.
[via Notebook Italia]