ASUS Retcon their CES Tablet Launches

Let’s flash back to CES 2011 for a second. ASUS at the event launched three Android 3.0 Honeycomb-based tablets - the Eee Pad Slider, the Eee Pad Transformer and the Eee Pad MeMO. Now it turns out a few of the details revealed were a lie and a “mistake”.

Whoops

Speaking to The Inquirer, John Swatton, ASUS Marketing said the company could not confirm if the tablets would be running Honeycomb because it has no idea on the detailed technical specifications required for the operating system. Instead, the tablets will ship with Android 2.3 Gingerbread at launch. He also mentioned that the expected launch window is Q3 2011, which is later than the announced launch window of Q2 2011.

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The Eee Pads will also be missing phone features, so they most likely won’t be able to access the Android Market as is dictated by Google policy. So it looks quite possible that ASUS will have to develop their own App Store for the devices. However, the Samsung Galaxy Player has gone ahead and become the first Wi-fi only device to support the Android Market, so a lot may change before the tablets eventually release.

Anyway, that’s a major snafu on ASUS’ part. To screw up on a massive stage like the CES has to be really embarrassing for the company, so they’ll be hoping to wipe this incident from people’s memories as soon as possible.