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A new rumor has surfaced from DigiTimes reporting ASUS is looking to evolve their netbook game in 2011 with either Chrome OS or – our precious – Android. It’ll be on the affordable side with pricing expected to sit anywhere between $200 and $250. They’re claiming it’ll be a 1o or 11 inch netbook.
ASUS has already shown their Android-based netbook card – they debuted tablet/netbook hybrids at CES this year called the Eee Pad Transformer and Eee Pad Slider (both pictured above). This would be a more traditional netbook, though, which makes things a bit interesting.
As far as processor technology goes, it’s believed that Intel’s established Atom series will be powering things under the hood, though which chipset exactly wasn’t said. While Chrome OS may be a better fit for a traditional netbook experience, Android has quickly become an easily-marketable household name and – to be quite honest – it can do a lot more than Chrome OS can in its current state. We’ll be keeping an eye out for further announcements from ASUS.
If they can make something like the OQO running Honeycomb I’m in.
Honeycomb may remain for the laptop that happen to have a capacitive touch screen, those will probably sell for $50-$100 more than the basic Chrome OS laptop. This is a transition and shows that the ARM Powered Chrome OS laptop will dominate laptop sales, as those are even cheaper, provide makers with more profit margins, thinner, lighter and can run 30 hours on a battery when a Pixel Qi screen is used.
So hot.
Dream device (been a dream for almost a year now):
Attach a keyboard and it runs ChromeOS as a netbook, detach the keyboard and it runs Android on a touch screen as a tablet.
Until then, no tablet or netbook for me.
If there would be a way to make it dual boot WinBloz 7 that would be cool. Still a lot of things I can’t do without that are only on Winbloz.
@mo
I like your thoughts… I have two of my own..
1)TabDock.. Own a X soon to be Bionic, enough hardware in the Bionic to power a 10″ tabdock, just need the price to be a lot lower than the current lapdock by Moto. I love the idea of these dumbdocks, our data stays with us, cheap dumbdock can be stored anyway without much fear of theft or loss, why spend all the money for a Droid and a Tab, when you can get both with a ‘dumb’dock?!
2)Convertable ultrathin Win 7 laptop by day, Android Tablet by night. To me this offers the best of all worlds.
Soooo glad Asus is entering this realm. Their designs are revolutionary. Look at the MeMo and now these. Bravo Asus, bravo.
This sounds like another pie in the sky rumor, probably based on a high level manager at ASUS declaring in a meeting “WE NEED A SUB-$250 NETBOOK POWERED BY GOOGLE”. What the rumor doesn’t mention is all the engineers snickering in the background “that runs on Unicorn Sperm instead of batteries and has a 5-D screen”.
If they do in fact come out with a sub-$250 netbook it will be so stripped down and anemic that every comment about its release will be about how much it sucks and they wished it had ten other features.
I hope Asus goes with Android on this and tells Google to incorporate Chrome OS into Android to get them to focus on one OS. Imagine how much better Android would be if they had the Chrome OS team helping out on Android. . .
If one like the left pic was released with Android, I’d buy one in a heartbeat. Decisions, decisions, the waiting game is as bad with tablets as it was with phones.
@riz
Yes my ideal dream device would actually just be a dumbdock a for superphone but then I thought that’s too much to ask.
@Aeires The one on the left (the Asus Slider) is supposed to ship with Honeycomb sometime this May or June. Hope that helps.
Why not just take off the keyboard make a $250 tablet?
@mo – Look up Redfly. They’ve been around for a while now for WinMo and BB devices and they’ve been grumbling about releasing Android support for like 2 years.
@Dave – Because it’s harder to engineer the one piece solution that’s thin and light than it is to engineer the slightly thicker and heavier clamshell device due to power and cooling. Besides, have you seen what replacement keyboard costs? It’s not like you save a ton of money leaving it off.
yes Android does make Chrome OS pretty much irrelevant.
@Sean
This looks promising!
$200 is a nice quote. I think every company can sell with this price!