ASUS Touch Devices Revealed

Literally an army of touch optimized machines were revealed today to land within the next few weeks of so. As marketing lead Jamie Zaldivar put it, everyone’s already thinking that their year end bonuses have already been spoken for… and with the variety that they put out, it sure seems that way.

Photo above shows L-R: Irene, Eason, Sir George, and Jamie holding up several of the unveiled touch devices.

Asus search for the incredible has led to the development of 8… count that, eight new Windows 8 optimized machines that span all manner of user types and requirements the highlight being the Taichi – the worlds first back to back fullHD IPS touch displays and it comes with a pressure sensitive pen too, albeit a powered one using a quadruple “A” battery.

The lined up devices from the leftmost of the presentation (lineup on the photo above) are the following: ASUS AIO ET2300, (59,995) 2 versions of the VivoBook E202 (20,995, 26,995) the VivoBook S400 (35,995), the Zenbook Touch (76,995), the Taichi (85,995), the VivoTab (42,995), the VivoTab RT (38,995), and at the rightmost was a previously unannounced VivoTab Smart (25,995). Enumerated in photo form below:

^The AIO ET2300 sports a 23″ display with 10 point multitouch and a tilting mechanism which allows for up to 90 degrees of variance.

^The VivoBook has two E202 configurations which differ in processor, and the S400 which is a 14 inch sports an i5 core.

^The Zenbook Touch being a 13.3 inch model allows for more tiles to be presented on the display (even more on the ET2300); Eason explained that the design of Windows 8 is to maintain a tile count depending on the screen size and independent of the screen resolution. It makes sense to the interface but in the programs I hope they maintained that the full resolution be utilized.

^Above you can see Eason demoing the pressure sensitivity of the Taichi on the external screen on tablet mode with the native drawing app.

^I scribbled upon the VivoTab on the Supernote app using the Wacom certified digitizer, this is a pre production unit and doesn’t instantly register the trail that should be left by the pen, let us hope that the final version has better response. The app, a note-taking one, also did not register the pen pressure and it’d be interesting to try it out on an Autodesk Sketchbook Pro or an equivalent.

^The VivoTab RT is unique as it utilizes the Windows 8 RT version. This, along with the VivoTab, has an improved docking system which has the latch at the side that allows detachment even when the transformable is in a closed lid position.

^The VivoTab Smart is the only one without a native keyboard and comes instead with a smart cover which can be complemented by an optional bluetooth keyboard.

This post was done completely a few minutes before boarding the plane to Cambodia using the screenshots on the Transformer (thus the black border on all the images), look forward to my guest bloggers, Aaron and Katsy (photo below) for this particular event, they should have more time to expound on the special features of each haha.

Edit: due to a fluke on the airport wifi service, the post was not able to completely finish uploading and now I’m left with the few hours in flight to put some more detail on the items I put on here, now this will be uploaded as soon as I get a decent internet connection going on over at Siam Reap, hopefully within the night as well.

Kudos to Asus for yet another exciting lineup for the end of the year!