14 DAY TRIAL // We spoke about how the Windows 8 on ARM project, abbreviated into WOA, had been kicked off, but ASUS was strangely absent from the list of involved companies.
It seems that the company is not actually all that concerned, or at least acts the part.
ASUS claims to be NVIDIA's largest client, and this may very well be true, from one perspective at least.
After all, there is a reason why it is the first company to release a tablet powered by the Tegra 3 Kal-El chip.
The Transformer Prime is getting to various corners of the world and is supposed to lead the company to yearly tablet sales of six million in 2012.
All these considered, it was quite strange that ASUS wasn't among the companies chosen to spearhead the WOA development (tablets with ARM chips but Windows 8 as an operating system instead of Android).
Instead, as we already said, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments had to choose a major and minor partner each.
The list turned out to be Lenovo and Acer for NVIDIA, Toshiba and Samsung for TI and Samsung and Sony for Qualcomm.
In other words, ASUS won't actually have any direct stake in how the WOA project develops.
This is the same situation that HP and Dell ended up in: both are big PC makers but neither got selected as a development partner.
That didn't stop ASUS from saying it was going to influence WOA anyway, or at least that is the word on the net.
Claiming to possess the strongest research-and-development capabilities of any notebook vendor, ASUS reportedly said that, since it continues to have tight connections to NVIDIA, it would still have a say in things.
Even if it doesn't contribute all that much, though, it will still have the Android market to spread across.