Asus Eee Pad Transformer Launch Price Drops Below $600USD and Counting

[xaueious]

We reported on the Asus Eee Pad Transformer's pending launch this Friday in Taiwan. The Facebook user-driven price drop campaign now has the device priced below the equivalent of $600USD (at $17539TWD at time of this article), and still dropping with more user clicks. This effectively puts the launch price inline with the American launch price of the wifi-only Motorola Xoom, which has very similar specifications.

A spokesperson from Asus Club has also posted a message on the Facebook group hinting that the price will likely drop below $17000TWD at some point (approximately $575USD). With less than two days left until the Friday launch, we estimate that the final price end up somewhere above the equivalent of $500USD. This would make it more expensive than the upcoming wifi-only Samsung Galaxy 10.1. Thus the trend of Honeycomb tablets priced at a premium continues.

Asus has also followed up with more complete specifications of the variant being launched. The launch price does not include the Eee keyboard docking station, and will only come with 16GB of internal memory. For comparison, the Xoom ships with 32GB of internal memory.

New closeup product pictures have also been released by Asus Club on Facebook, several of which were included in this article.

 

[Jaxidian]

I really think that this tablet has a lot going for it. I think it's the first of a long line of tablet/dock combinations that we're going to see become much more common. This tablet itself doesn't change the game but it's a preview of what we will begin to see as being more common. Asus was smart to be the first to market this trend (along with Motorola with the Atrix, kinda).

Giving up a laptop completely for a tablet is hard to do but a "laptop dock" for your tablet starts to make it doable for some people. And as tablets advance in maturity, the definition of "some people" in that last sentence will continue to grow.

I wrote a little blog post about this at the beginning of the year in case you're interested.

 

[Fuganater]

Now I'm interested. This might make me rething buying a new laptop.

 

[feverhost]

...sooo... price SNAFU.. or marketing ploy?