Asus gets paid handsomely for swallowing Google's Jellybean ASUSTeK - Asus to you and me - has pulled a surprise jump in profit out of the bag as its tablets make up for slow PC sales. The Taiwanese firm reported its largest quarterly profit in more than four years, spurred by its partnership with Google on the Nexus 7 and the enduring popularity of its own-brand snap-on keyboard …
If the price is right, a tablet is just a tablet and nothing more. I bought an Assus Transformer Pad TF101 and I'm not too unhappy with it although I'm using it only when I'm too lazy to fetch my laptop. What bothers me most is that links on most web pages are so painfully close to each other that makes it impractical to navigate without a mouse.
That's a bit odd; it's a touch screen after all, you can pinch to zoom. I find that a lot easier than using a mouse.
I loved the article's line about it all being about advertising. Maybe these devices sell because they, you know, meet people's needs? Anyway, I'm happy they are selling and Asus is making a profit from them since that hopefully means they keep making them and improving them. Another thing that might be mentioned is the firmware updates, got mine updated over the air (well, wi-fi) last week with no issues.
You've never used a Nexus 7, I assume? Incredibly priced for some excellent kit. And that's just one Android tablet - there are loads out there and, though I'm sure there must be some weaker ones amongst them, with so much variety there are certain to be some other good ones.
But, meh, you were probably just trolling (an instinct I have never understood).
Do keep up, according to the developer dashboard, 10% of the devices that accessed the Google Play store were tablets (large screen and higher).
As clearly you have just arrived from 2009.
Android tablets account for 45% of the tablet market. Expect that to be 55% next year or higher, given the number of Nexus tablets under trees. Of course those numbers don't include bastard Android devices like the Kindle Fire..
Whilst no single tablet dominiates like the iPad, collectively, they are a considerable number. Sound familiar? Yep, it's like the smartphone market was in the year you just came from.
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Jellybean and Google aside, their tablet efforts aren't half-bad and they were actually the only company that had "low-balled" their initial production runs and ended up with shortages instead of unsold stock.
And while their tablet strategy was solid, they came up with what was unanimously deemed as the best ultrabook available. And to re-inforce their point they're pushing the same beautiful form to the desktop replacement, discrete GPU segment (losing the Ultrabook name due to battery life).
Combine it with solid support, frequent updates and a minimally invasive overlay and no wonder they're on to a winner.
No surprises that people buy their stuff a lot, be it cheap netbooks, high end tablet-netbook-crossover-things, or motherboards and graphics cards.
Happy owner of an Asus motherboard with all kinds of lovely features, and a TF201 which is one very nippy Droid-top. Updated to Jelly Bean flavour too.
All the more amazing given how little they advertise on radio or tv. Apple, Google and Samsung have figured it out and look at their current sales. If Asus made their site a bit more friendly and launched the right commercials I think they could do a lot better. Perhaps it will occur to Asus that they could do ads like Google does for the Nexus 7 but for actual Asus branded kit. It would do wonders for name recognition among the general public here in the US.
It never ceases to amaze me how the traditional ad spaces are nearly forgotten by so many device manufacturers regardless of ad budget and I firmly believe it is what killed Palm even before HP administered the coup de grâce.
While I wish them good luck, I can't help feeling that the laptop makers will start building their x86 laptops with a detachable screen and ARM chippery.
That assumes that a 13" or 15" screen would work. The problem is, it doesn't need to work well, it just needs to be very cheap - which it will be if its something they would have bought anyway. A thin bezel with the outer 1.5" of the screen deactivated on a 13" laptop would probably be about right for a 10" tablet.
If RT goes in on the same basis as OEM windows (paid for whether you want it or not, or bundled as part of an windows OEM license), it will smother the market for independent devices. Even if RT is a bit rubbish, there'll be inertia against jailbreaking, especially if its a work laptop with jailbreaking verboten.
This is where it comes down to whether MS can (ahem) strongarm Dell, HP and Lenovo faster than anti-trust action can be effective.
> I can't help feeling that the laptop makers will start building their x86 laptops with a detachable screen and ARM chippery.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by x86 laptops using ARM chips, unless you mean as a secondary system, i.e, boot into a low power ARM environment for checking emails or browsing, or boot into full fat x86 Windows for when you're nearer a power socket.
I agree with what I think is your general point- this distinction between what we now call laptops and what we now call tablets will become ever fuzzier.
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