Asus aims to ship up to 2 million tablet PCs in 2011

Asus expects to ship between 1.5 million and 2 million tablet PCs in 2011, a spokesperson said during the company's February 11 investors conference, according to DigiTimes. In fact, the OEM's Q4 2010 Investor Conference slides reveal that it is aiming to achieve double digit market share in the non-Apple platform tablet market this year.

Asus is already offering an Intel-based 12.1-inch Eee Slate EP121 running Windows 7 as of last month. The company still plans on launching three Android 3.0 (codenamed Honeycomb) tablets: a 10.1-inch Eee Pad Transformer EP101 equipped with Nvidia Tegra 2 in April 2011 (a hybrid netbook-tablet), a 10.1-inch Eee Pad Slider EP102 equipped with Nvidia Tegra 2 in May 2011 (the name slider implies it's a tablet with a slide-out keyboard), as well as 7-inch 3G-enabled Eee Pad MeMo EP71 equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon in June 2011 (a hybrid between an e-book reader and a tablet).

Asus is going to have a tough time battling against the many various tablet offerings from this year, including the HP Touchpad, RIM's BlackBerry Playbook, Apple's iPad 2, Motorola Xoom, and the just-announced HTC Flyer, among many others. Our recommendation is to wait until the dust settles.