ASUS EEE Slate EP121

Philippine tech guru Abe on his blog Yugatech has just announced the arrival of the ASUS ‘Coalition’ of tablet devices which are the Transformer, the Slider, and the Slate. Amongst them, the artist in me is most interested in the Slate:

While the majority of tablet devices out in the market today run several different flavors of mobile operating systems, the slate is going to come with a full Windows 7; that basically means that all of the programs you have on your desktop will run on it.

What clearly removes this from the competition is the inclusion of a Gorilla Glass – Wacom Digitizer display. Its practically a miniaturized Cintiq; (and for those wondering what that is, its a very VERY expensive digital canvas) what type of artist wouldn’t want this in their arsenal eh?

Running an Intel Core i5, it is indeed quite powerful; That combined with an SSD and all manner of connectivity (HDMI, BT, USB, WiFi) this really does not belong in the category of capacitive tablets meant to be operated by hand. At 12 inches, it will be the biggest tablet out in the Philippine market when it hits store shelves, with the listed specifications, we may just be looking at the most expensive one as well. It will also come with its own bluetooth keyboard so you can simply prop it up on its leather stand and start typing away without obstructing the screen with an awfully large keyboard.

Check out the following videos for a comparative between that and the Cintiq and see for yourself how much valuable it could be in your hands.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZg9bEPm1E] [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LTKFWt-Mrg]

It will most likely hit the store shelves within the last days of March and first week of April. I have seriously been looking forward to this one. A singular caveat is leaving me to think… reported battery life is about 4 to 5 hours, for serious sketching work, it may not be enough… ‘may’ being the operative word.