ASUS Tablets coming in June!!

There's a rush on to get tablets to the market by many companies around the globe. Now comes the announcement by netbook (a category of product that is threatened by the tablets) pioneers Asus that they are going to launch a tablet in Computes in June 2010.

This is going to be based on Tegra processor. That is a special processor again. It'd be a subject of another post soon! There are many a tablet products on the market already. It'd be interesting to see if tablets take away a chunk of the netbook category.

Intel Atom Processor

Ultra portables or the UMPCs are taking off looks like. So does the Intel Atom processor. Engadget announced the Intel made Atom based UMPC. This is how it looks.












Couple of other machines are being shown off at the Intel Developer's Forum at Shanghai. Asus has announced a Eee based on the Atom, that is well known. But Thinno's Eee clone was a surprise item.
Register Hardware reports from IDF at Shanghai:

Intel was keen to show off its Atom processor in the run-up to Intel Developer Forum (IDF), and drummed up a trio of machines to show it off - including the 7in Asus Eee PC.

Asus' plan to adopt Atom is well known, at least as far as the upcoming 8.9in Eee PC 900 goes. Less well known is new brand Thinno, which was showing its unnamed Eee-alternative. Demo'd with two laptops - one running Red Hat Linux; the other, Windows XP - the Thinno machines were fitted with 1.6GHz Atoms and 512MB of memory.

It's worth keeping a eye on the UMPC developments as well as the Atom.

UMPC Or The Ultra Mobile PC

Recently came across this again with quite a force. While working with the deal site work I have been seeing the reference to ultra mobile machines quite often, though of a particular model from Asus. But that did clearly indicate this category of notebooks is actually growing.

Then came across this blog dedicated to UMPCs. I was a little surprised at the variety of models that are getting quite a bit popular. Though I missed the opportunity for writing about them, the idea keeps swirling in my mind that I should go ahead and start writing about them. This may become of the niches I am looking for eventually.

VIA technologies' C7 chip seems to be getting quite poplar as x86 compatible processor of choice for such devices. May be I should start with an article on this little chip first!