Asus announces Transformer Book Trio Tablet: 11.6″ 1080p PC is a Windows laptop when docked, an Android tablet when undocked.
Asus has long offered a line of Android tablets that slot into keyboard docks, but at its Computex press conference it announced it would be taking this concept one step further. Its new Transformer Book Trio is a tablet running Android (an unspecified version of Jelly Bean, to be a bit more precise); when docked, it becomes a Haswell-equipped Windows 8 Ultrabook.
The laptop contains all the ingredients for a standard Ultrabook in its base: a 4th-generation Haswell CPU, 1TB of storage, an unspecified amount of RAM, and a 33WHr battery. Behind the 11.6-inch 1080p display is an entirely separate computer based on Intel’s Clover Trail+ Atom platform: the 2GHz Atom Z2580, 2GB of RAM, 64GB of solid-state storage, and a 19WHr Asus Eee pc 1000 Battery.
When the laptop is docked, Engadget reports that a button press will switch between the Windows 8 installation in the base and the Android installation in the lid. Undocking the lid switches the tablet to a full-time Android tablet pc, though since the hardware is x86-based, one wonders if Windows 8 system couldn’t be installed on it with some effort. The digital mobile device combines a couple of concepts that Asus is already using elsewhere. Its Transformer Pad tablets have long been keyboard-dockable, and the Transformer AiO also uses a detachable screen to double as a tablet (though in that case the tablet’s hardware is ARM-based).
The computer will apparently launch in Q3 of this year, pricing information is not yet available.
