Oct 29, 2010 12:06 GMT  ·  By

While everyone's been waiting like...forever for Asus to finally enter the tablet segment with some real products, not just designs and promises, it would seem that we'll all have to quench our “thirst” for these ultra-portable computing systems with some more rumors, these time apparently generated by none other than the company's president, Jerry Shen.

So, according to a report by Digitimes (that, as always, should be taken with at least a pinch of salt), it would seem that the Taiwanese company is planning to start the mass production of the 12-inch Internet tablets built on an Intel platform and running a Windows operating system (presumably, Windows 7, but the embedded Windows OS shouldn't be completely ruled out either) at some point in December, with the channel availability being set for early 2011.

Apparently, Asus' plans for late 2010/early 2011 go way beyond the 12-inch model, the company also working on two 7-inch models and two 9-inch models, planned for a Spring 2011 release, thus more or less covering the entire tablet spectrum.

While details regarding the operating systems running on the two 7-inch tablets have not been provided, it seems that they'll be providing advanced capabilities, including Wi-Fi support and a 3G module.

The 9-inch models, on the other hand, will apparently be built on the NVIDIA Tegra 2 platform, and will run either the Windows or Android operating systems, with estimate pricing being set at around 100 US dollars.

It's also interesting to note that Asus takes this particular market segment very seriously, the company's CEO claiming that they've actually transferred quite a large number of researchers from their handset division to the tablet division (not sure whether this is related to the split of the Garmin-Asus venture, but it might have something to do with it).  

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More Asus tablets to arrive on the future
More Asus tablets to arrive on the future
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