14 DAY TRIAL // The Eee Pad may have become ASUS' weapon of choice in the war over the nascent tablet market, but it appears that said slate is not the only electronic with a tablet form factor the company has in store. In fact, the PC and hardware maker has come up with what it describes as one of the most accurate and sensitive note taking devices on the market. Dubbed simply Eee Tablet, the electronic does well at expanding the meaning of the word to more than 'just' keyboard-less media (or industrial) devices based on touch input.
The gizmo does use touch, of course, but it is not meant for multimedia. In fact, multimedia is out of the question, considering that the LCD used is a gray scale display. Instead, the Eee Tablet is intended as a means to take notes on the fly and, as such, is optimized for fast page turns and input accurateness. Turning a page takes just 0.1 seconds and the built-in Notepad templates let owners store, sort, annotate and tag their notes on the fly.
What makes this wide feature set worthwhile is the LCD touchscreen display itself. With a 2,450 dpi input sensitivity, annotations should feel just like writing on paper, which is significant for a resolution of 1,024 x 768. Reading books in electronic format, as well as other documents, is also supported. As for actual specifications, the 8-inch digital notebook comes with a MicroSD slot, a 2-megapixel webcam and a 10-hour battery life. The full list of internal parts has not yet been handed out.
The webcam is mostly intended for taking shots of lecture slides, which can be annotated and synchronized back to a PC over USB. Finally, September is the earliest one can expect to see the Eee Tablet in stores, at a reported price between $199 and $299.