We just witnessed quite the interview between ASUS chairman Jonney Shih and Walt Mossberg at AsiaD, and out of doors of exposing the Transformer Prime (and affirming that the approaching Padfone would ship with Android 4.0), he also dropped a number of other nuggets worth mention to the audience here in Hong Kong. For starters, he finally caved to Walt’s pestering about who his main competition was, specifically with regards to the hot Zenbook. “The Mac[Book] Air,” he stated, chuckling slyly afterwards, but quickly continuing directly to plug his own machine in accordance with its own merits. Not surprisingly, he also expressed his confidence that Android tablets still had quite a few life left available in the market, and he stated that ASUS continues to be heading in the right direction to transport its target — around two million — Android tablets this year. Moving onto the subject of netbooks, Shih noted that other than being buried, netbooks are simply “evolving.” More importantly, however, was his subtle confirmation that a new ASUS netbook is en route: “You will see on our new netbook, it will become very thin.” In reality, he even suggested that the design may follow that of the Zenbook , but just… smaller.
When asked about his thoughts on people replacing laptops less frequently, and maybe shifting disposable income to smartphones and tablets, Jonney maintained that every one of these markets were key to ASUS’ success, and that none were taking a backseat. “We believe that this an excessively critical time, transitioning from the private computing era to the ever present cloud computing era.” Sounds just like another mantra we heard, truth be informed, but ASUS have been riding the cloud bandwagon long before most other consumer companies even knew what it was. The original spate of Eee PCs had next to no internal storage; rather, they trusted accessing the internet with a purpose to deliver the majority in their functionality. Jonney also noted that ASUS is making an attempt to tackle a captivating problem with its products, that is that few people can truly separate work and entertainment — in other words, you’d like products that adequately handle both worlds. We’re guessing a Padfone + Transformer Prime + Zenbook is his preferred trifecta to do exactly that.
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