As expected, monthly shipments of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer tablet have reached 400,000 units, making the company's goal to ship a total of 2 million tablets in 2011 quite attainable. Asus' tablet shipments are expected to grow further in Q3 2001; the company has requested its touch panel providers supply a monthly target of 400,000 units to 500,000 units during the quarter, according to sources at upstream panel suppliers, cited by DigiTimes.
It turns out Asus has even bigger plans for the Transformer. Internally, the company has set a more aggressive goal for boosting its tablet shipments in 2011: Asus has reportedly placed contract orders of as high as 4 million to 4.5 million units for the second half of the year. If Asus can pull that number off, it will be in the list of top tablet makers.
When the Asus Eee Pad Transformer arrived in the US three months ago, it was quickly sold out. Rumors suggested that the device was low in volumes due to component shortages or even because of quality control issues but Asus declared that finding a unit was hard due to demand, not supply. The company announced two months ago that it was increasing the number of units shipped. Last month, Asus CEO Jerry Shen has already gone on record saying that the Transformer will exceed shipments of all other tablets, besides the Apple iPad.
The Eee Pad Transformer sets itself apart from the tablet competition with an optional chiclet-style keyboard dock that essentially transforms the device into a netbook. Besides making the device much more convenient to type on and handle productivity tasks, it also extends battery life from around 9.5 hours to 16 hours thanks to a second battery within. The actual device costs $400 for the 16GB Wi-Fi only model, although the dock will set you back an extra $150.
The Transformer has a 10.1-inch 1280×800 IPS Gorilla Glass capacitive touchscreen display, a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 5MP rear and 1.2MP front cameras, a Micro SD expansion slot, and HDMI out. You'll also find speakers and audio jacks, USB 2.0, 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity, as well as a G-sensor, light sensor, gyroscope, e-compass, and GPS. It also comes with Asus' Waveshare interface, which includes MyNet (streams media to networked devices), MyLibrary (digital bookstore) and MyCloud (cloud storage and remote access tool).
The Transformer comes with Android 3.0 (codenamed Honeycomb) but is upgradeable to Android 3.1 (codenamed Honeycomb) via an over-the-air update. Asus is currently testing an update to Android 3.2 (codenamed Honeycomb).