Is the Asus 'Transformer II' Arriving in September?

Asus just launched the Eee Pad Transformer and already there are rumours of the Taiwanese company all set to launch its successor as early as September. The news comes from Asus' Chairman, Jonney Shih who, during a meeting with Forbes, hinted at the second Transformer device in the works and said that it would be “impressive”. Another clue comes from Digitimes, who’ve reported that Taiwan-based touch panel manufacturer, Wintek, has been signed up by Asus to begin production of panels for their second generation Transformer tablet. Wintel will start off with small volume shipments in the middle of Q3, while large volumes will begin towards the end of the quarter.

What is Asus planning?

If there is some truth to this, then we could and should expect the Transformer II to pack in Nvidia’s Tegra 3 processor, codenamed Kal-El. The new chip is a quad-core processor that’s said to be a lot more power efficient than the current Tegra 2. Apart from this, Asus will also be launching two other tablets that they demoed at CES and Computex in the coming months. The Eee Pad Slider, which is another 10-inch tablet with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and the Eee Pad MeMo, their 7-inch 3D-enabled tablet.

Launching a successor to the Transformer so early on would definitely hurt the sales of the current model, unless Asus is planning a big price drop. September is not too far away, so lets just wait and see how this pans out.