14 DAY TRIAL // Once again the US Federal Communications Commission has provided information on a product, or in this case a pair of products, that won't be out for a while yet.
Certainly, being certified by the FCC means that a product is just about ready to show up for sale, but ASUS won't sell the ones herein spoken of until next month.
That doesn't mean we won't write some of what we know about them, especially since we've done something of the sort before. Back in April, we discovered the price and arrival date.
The FCC filing is of the Wi-Fi iteration of the ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity 700.
It will rely on NVIDIA's Tegra 3 SoC and will feature a 10.1-inch LCD whose native resolution is 1,920 x 1,200 pixels. That's right, this is a “Full HD tablet.”
We'd have expected the broadband-equipped slate to also be included in the filing, or get its own, separate one. Unfortunately, the FCC didn't do either of those for some reason.
Fortunately, we already know the essential bits, such as the fact that the same Full HD panel will be present.
The main platform isn't the same though. Rather than NVIDIA's ARM-based chip, the ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity 3G/4G will use a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 instead.
ASUS Transformer Pad Infinity 700 will be the successor of the Eee Pad Transformer Prime, so we hope that there won't be a repeat of those problems that plagued the latter. The Prime was fairly well received, but random restarts soured customers to it, as did having a troubled GPS that eventually couldn't be fixed without a special USB dongle.
ASUS should start selling the Infinity on June 10, 2012, for the price of 599 Euro. That's 785 USD, according to exchange rates, but we expect (and hope) for something closer to $450-$600.