Why buy three devices when one will do?
Taiwan’s Asustek Computer Inc. is hoping many today’s mobile workforce and gadget-loving consumers would appreciate the logic in that.
Introduced today at the Computex Trade show in Taipei, the company’s Transformer Book Trio is essentially an 11.6-inch Android tablet with a 2GHz Intel Atom 2580 processor. However, snap a keyboard onto the device and morphs into a laptop that can run on Microsoft’s touch-enhanced Windows 8 operating system as well.
Detach the Trio’s display and its hard drive and Core i7 processor can be connected to a wireless monitor effectively turning the device into a desktop
The tablet has a 16.9 aspect ratio IPS display with 1920×1080 resolution and 64GB of storage. The keyboard has a 750GB hard drive.
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The Trio can even be split into separate devices that can be used at the same time, because the tablet and keyboard each have their own batteries, according to Jonney Shih, chairman of Asus. For instance, one person can be using the keyboard as a PC while another can be working on the tablet.
Because the device can run both Android and Windows, users have access to 700,000 apps in Google Play and more than 50,000 apps from the Windows store.
This is not the first time that Asus has introduced a combo device. Two years ago, the company introduced the PadFone. The device is an Android smart phone which docks into the back of a 10.1-inc tablet PC. In its laptop configuration the PadFone had 64 hours of extended battery life.
Last year, it also released the Transformer AiO, an all-in-one PC that transforms into a tablet device able to run both Android and Windows 8 operating systems.