ASUS wants to be an open Apple, vows "killer" June device
updated 02:45 pm EST, Wed February 10, 2010
ASUS chief thinks Eee Pad will take on iPad
ASUS wants to transform itself into 'another Apple' and has a device in the works to help it along, company CEO Jonney Shih said Wednesday. He hopes his Taiwan firm will be put on the Mac maker's level but serve as an open-source alternative that uses Android and Chrome OS, not just closed options like Windows.
Shih also teased that ASUS will have a "killer product" in June that could help towards this goal. He hasn't provided any details of his own but is known to be referring to the Eee Pad, a small tablet that is now ostensibly set to compete against the iPad. Most details are still indefinite, but it's likely to cost below $500 and to use NVIDIA's Tegra 250 as well as Android. With a screen between 4 and 7 inches across, it's more likely to be a large MID (mobile Internet device) than a full tablet computer.
News of the company's ambitions arrives just as it has formalized the spin-off of Pegatron as a separate manufacturing company and has entered into previously untapped Asian countries like Indonesia, where it hopes to boost its market share.
Android
02/10, 03:00pm reply
or Chrome? I'd have thought Chrome would be more suited...
rytc
Senior User
Joined: Jan 2001
Can't Wait
02/10, 03:05pm reply
Can't wait to see the Pee Pad, but I guess we'll have to.
Foe Hammer
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Joined: Feb 2005
Wannabe
02/10, 03:34pm reply
Unless his culture becomes like Apple, it won't even be a copy. If he wants to be like Apple but use another operating system, it seems delirium is on his side.
Bobfozz
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Joined: Jul 2008
Why does this sound a bit like...
02/10, 03:37pm reply
...Michael Scott's Big Surprise? Will we all get free ice creams sandwiches?
jpellino
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Joined: Oct 1999
More like a Dell
02/10, 04:04pm reply
How can they be like Apple when all they make is hardware? A better role model is Dell. Any company that is software-only or hardware-only is handicapped. Google realized this when they started selling their own phone.
Until android apps become optimized for larger screens, they will just look odd.
The Google camp has already splintered their (third party) hardware offerings into many pieces, and now they split their OS into two pieces. They are making it very difficult on the developers, not to mention the poor consumers who now have too many confusing choices.
JohnFromBeyond
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Joined: Sep 2007
I don't know...
02/10, 04:25pm reply
When you read about how Google is starting to annoy the GNU crowd, and more specifically read WHY they're annoying them, the possibility of a really good Android device sounds more plausible. Basically, Google is doing as Apple did with Webkit: instead of writing open code and hoping someone will make it good someday (as is the usual open source mechanism), they are writing good code and then making it open. (And you'll notice that to that end Android jettisons a lot of the dumber decisions of desktop Linux, such as the use of X11.)
There's nothing actually preventing a really good Android-based tablet, although I admit I'd really rather see someone put a lot of resources into Haiku OS instead. A netbook running a completed version of Haiku would be sixteen different flavors of awesome.
The Vicar
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Just Being Nostalgic
02/10, 04:50pm (1 reply) reply
Someone should release a tablet with BeOS, or perhaps AmigaOS.
JBytes
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Joined: May 2000