After being the center of attraction for media, users, Windows enthusiasts and others, Windows 8 will finally be out this year and with this curiosity to know what tablet manufacturing companies will have their names added with it has also increased among all!

So, any idea which companies will be tagged as Windows 8 tablet makers once the new Windows hit the market this year? Well, there are number of popular manufacturers that will get to included in the long list of tablet manufacturing companies, some of these are HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and Asus which will come up with their Windows 8 tablet sometimes in October this year.

The other names that came into limelight for working on their own set of Windows 8 tablet to be introduced in the earliest possible part of 2013 happen to be Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, and Lenovo.

Well, as far as Dell is concerned, it has been keeping quiet about its plans for coming up with its tablet. It did launch the Dell Streak 10 tablet based on Android Honeycomb last year but it kind of kissed goodbye to it soon.

There’s a somewhat similar story about HP. It did land up into tablet market but couldn’t taste much success with its HP TouchPad which did gain popularity but it couldn’t last that long.

Interestingly, both the companies got ready to try out their luck in the tablet market once again with Windows 8 tablets.

A leaked picture has come to our notice that has given some authenticity to the rumors related to the forthcoming smaller equivalent of Asus’ 10 inch Transformer Prime. Though it has not yet been made clear that would it be one or two of the 7 inch devices coming up with speculations around the 7 inch Transformer Prime as well as a refreshed version of the last year’s Eee Pad Memo.

However, the rumors around are confidently announcing that either one or may be a blend of the both will be making its presence during the Consumer Electronic Show this year.

The picture of the device published by Notebook Italia, an online media brought the device to the world which is quite similar to the Transformer Prime in terms of its aesthetics and has some resemblance with the Memo which is found to have bulkier edge. The rumor monger site is pretty sure that the mini Transformer will be introduced as a separate device but interestingly no specifications are revealed yet other than the commonly known ones like – a hardware keyboard attachment, Android (probably Ice Cream Sandwich), and a price tag which can easily be afforded (something like $299).

Notebook Italia seems quite sure that the overhauled Eee Pad Memo will be available with a capacitive display of 1280X800, Qualcomm Snapdragon Processor of 1.2Hz, an integrated flash memory of between 16GB to 64GB and Wi-Fi as well as 3G connectivity. And there’s also a possibility of Ice Cream Sandwich to be present at the time of the launch. Though extra details are yet to be made available, on the basis of the name of the device, it is being assumed that the device will be supporting pen input as well as the handwriting software.

These upcoming products from Asus will be competing with numerous other second-gen products in the 7 and 10 inch product range. Sadly, the market hardly looks any changed compared to how it was doing last year. However, it appears there will be a little less cluttering as some of the major playing PC makers would be concentrating on the Ultrabooks in place of tablets. But then, there are sure signs that the first half of 2012 will be ruled by Apple’s iPad & Amazon’s Kindle Fire and some of the Android devices that have made some place in the market.

Asus has recently made an announcement that they are making their Eee Pad Transformer Prime ‘hybrid’ tablet available for worldwide purchase this December. The tablet will be making its debutant presence in the market with quad-core Tegra3 processor from Nvidia, codenamed as Kal-El.The Transformer Prime came into the light only a month back when it was briefly shown at the Conference AsiaD by Jonney Shih, the chairman of Asus, though the specifications and other details weren’t much disclosed by him then.

Nvidia’s quad core Tegra 3 SoC will prove helpful in powering up the unit as Nvidia boasts that Tegra 3 is about 5 times faster than their earlier version Tegra 2 in its overall performance. To specify its improved performance, it will offer four times faster web browsing and a three times better graphics when compared with its earlier version.

Other specifications include its body which is 8.3mm or 0.33 inch thin and has a weight of about 586g or 1.29lbs. It offers an 8MP rear camera with an LED flash, F/2.4 aperture and a back illuminated CMOS sensor offering low light noise reduction.  It also has a shooter of 1.2MP on the front and Super IPS+ display of 1280 x 800 resolutions with Corning Gorilla Glass coating that offers a maximum brightness of 600 nits.

One can buy the new Transformer Prime either in 32GB or in 64GB of internal flash storage versions. The both of which offer a micro SD card slot that helps in expansion and easy transfer of files. The system memory is of 1GB and you even get a 3.5mm combo audio jack as well as a micro HDMI port. You get a battery life of 12 long hours when on a charge. And when the keyboard dock’s 22Wh battery is attached, its battery life is said to be 18 hours.

The 32GB model will be priced from $499 and the price for the 64GB model will start from $599. And if you are to buy the optional mobile dock accessory, you’ll have to bear $149 more. It is believed that the tablet will hit the market with Android 3.2 however it is being estimated that it will soon be offering an Ice Cream Sandwich update.

Asus has taken the veil off its line of ultrabooks under the head of new Zenbook brand. These are five models in total within a price range of $999 to $1499. The specifications of Zenbook UX21 includes a display configuration of 11.6 inch or 1366 X 768, SSD storage of 128GB and is available with Core i5-2467M or Core i7-2677M, whereas Zenbook UX31 offers a display screen of 13.3 inch or 1600 X 900. It is available in three versions: one with Core i5-2557M with SSD storage of 128GB, another one is a similar model with SSD storage of 256GB, and third one offers a Core i7-2677M.

Both the 11.6 inch Zenbook UX21 and 13.3 inch Zenbook UX31 are light and easy to handle with weight of 2.4 pounds and 2.9 pounds respectively. They also happen to be one of the sleekest and most stylish looking notebooks known to be present in the market with their bodies made up of aluminum alloy, all metal keyboards and neatly made glass trackpads.

The 11 inch UX21 has a thickness of 0.11 inch at its front and 0.67 inch at the rear whereas the 13 inch UX31 comes in 0.11 inch thickness at the front and 0.71 inch at the rear.

The best of all the features that these models offer is the one which enables the system to resume from sleep in as less a time as 2 seconds. Talking about the battery life we find, UX21 models offering about 5 hours of runtime and up to 7 days of standby whereas UX31 offers slightly longer battery life with 7 hours of runtime and 10 days of standby after charging it once.

Other important specifications that the Asus Zenbooks offer is RAM of 4GB, one USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0 ports, 0.3MP webcam, microHDMI and miniVGA outputs, connectivity through 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 4.0. You also get Bang and Olufsen’s ICEpower technology empowered stereo speakers that will attract more audiophiles toward it.

If you compare the 13.3 inch Zenbook UX31 to its rival MacBook Air, you won’t find much difference in the specifications, however Asus Zenbook is cheaper by about $200 compared to the MacBook and is available at $1,099. Again, the resolution that its display offers is a bit higher which happens to be 1600 X 900 compared to 1440 X 900 offered by its rival. The Zenbooks can be shopped in the US from today itself.

ASUS, apart from rolling out its new Eee Pad Transformer tablet in India this June, has also declared that it will also introduce an update for Android 3.1 over the air that will start next month. ASUS will announce the nation-wise schedule in June.

The 10.1 inch tablet, Eee Pad transformer can be modified into a netbook by simply attaching it to its keypad dock. Right now, the Transformer is available with Android 3.0 and will be one of the first devices which will be available in its updated version.

Acer Iconia A500 tablet is next on the line to get updated in June. It was rolled out in India hardly a couple of weeks back. Appears strange or not, Acer officials have decided not to open their lips to comment on the upcoming release of the update in the Indian market.

Another tablet which is going to have this update for the Indian market is Motorola Xoom. But it is noteworthy that it is yet to be launched in India. This update is important for the tablet as it can already be bought through many e-commerce websites.

Special improvements in the user interface of Android 3.1, more popularly known as Honeycomb, has been made which will make it work more efficiently with far more speed. Other than this, improvements in the UI transitions all through the system as well as throughout the standard apps have also been made.

The update will prove further beneficial by providing support for several USB based components and accessories like keyboards, mice, digital cameras, game controllers, etc.

A kind of complete revampment of the browser has been done resulting into the support of the web standards like CSS, CSS fixed positioning for all sites, and 3D animation.

Playback support for the embedded HTML5 video content will also result from this. So now it will be possible to save web pages that will include all styling and images for the local offline viewing.

Carrying on with its tradition of being the cutting edge multinational computer product producer, ASUS has rolled out a range of brand new motherboards for its consumers. These motherboards are powered by the Intel Z68 Express chipset. Plenty of adroit features are offered by the ASUS P8Z68 Series and ROG Maximus IV GENE-Z motherboards that properly utilize the performance benefits offered by Sandy Bridge technology without compromising the performance. Many new features and novelties are introduced to the Z68 platform at same time maintaining the optimum performance and dependability.

Till now it has only been ASUS that has been successful in integrating various new technologies in bunch on the Z69 motherboards at the time of launch. These comprise of implementing LucidLogix Virtu switchable graphics universally in order to utilize the capabilities of Intel Quik Sync Video for making video transcoding faster along with better performance of AMD graphics cards and latest NVIDIA and at the same time accelerate the performance of the hard drive with Intel Smart Response Technology reducing energy consumption.

ASUS Z69 based motherboards prove a great choice for the consumers as it offers most of the innovative PC technology. It offers new digital power control that works well in getting improved response and highly delicate system tuning. The exclusive UEFI BIOS gets you mouse input and explicably user friendly, easier and low level system control through the BIOS graphical user interface.

Faster Video Transcoding as well as Switchable Graphics are fully Supported

LucidLogix Virtu graphics virtualization engine is supported by all the ASUS Z68 based motherboards as they are natively designed to do so. This virtualization engine offered by the motherboards work together with Intel Quick Sync Video and thus about three times faster and smoother playback and video transcoding are offered. This feature is achieved as a result of immediate and seamless switching between a discrete graphics card and integrated Sandy Bridge graphics. Support for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs is offered by the motherboards of ASUS P8Z68 Series and Maximus IV GENE-Z. This is possible because of the uncompromising engineering quality they offer and it also gets you optimum flexibility in the automatic graphics switching feature.

Intel Smart Response Technology is also a part of the new ASUS Z68 based motherboards. Thus the benefits of SSD speed along with the traditional hard drive storage capacity, possibility to cut short the lengthy data access together with boot times of the system in the process are offered as a solid state cache is used by it. Again this feature is beneficial in cutting down the redundancy of hard drive spin resulting to lower consumption of energy and PC running costs.

All New BIOS together with the delivery of Segment leading Digital Power

A broad range of technologies are offered by the new Z68 based motherboards of ASUS as it has achieved much success and acclaim from its ASUS P8P67 Series.  At its debut, DIGI + VRM  is used as a new standard for the digital power control which gives PC users get more accurate tuning in place of analog power control. DIGI + VRM also work to increase the reliability, durability, and the over-clocking potential which makes it deliver the most adequate power in the range of Z68 based motherboards.

The P8Z68 Series motherboards and the Maximus IV GENE-Z also comprise of the distinctive UEFI BIOS from ASUS. Automatic and more user friendly graphical mouse controlled BIOS, unique EZ Mode is assimilated for fast and easy access to more dashing system management and set up. Drag and drop boot drive prioritization is also offered by the UEFI BIOS which makes a process simple which created much trouble for the new PC users in the past. This gets all-inclusive real time system information to the user along with the support for hard drives with capacities more than 2.2TB for better PC experience.

Asus officially brought out its Eee Pad Transformer in Taiwan on 25^th March at CeBit 2011. Its primary system consists of an Android tablet of 10.1 inch that comes along with a chiclet style keyboard dock which is its optional part and converts the device into a netbook. The availability of the slate in the US has not yet been confirmed though its price has been estimated to be an equivalent of approximate 500 US dollars and the keyboard is estimated to cost around $100.

The device has some remarkable features like Google’s Android 3.0 Honeycomb and Gorilla Glass capacitive touchscreen of 1289X800 IPS along with its flexibility. The tablet’s 0.51 inch body weighs 1.49 pound which comes packed up with a dual core Nvidia Tegra 2 SoC, rear and front cameras of 5 and 1.2 MP respectively. It also offers storage of 16 GB to 64 GB along with an expansion slot of Micro SD and a RAM of 1 GB.

There are plenty of other exciting specifications that the device offers, that include speakers and audio jacks; USB 2.0 and HDMI ports; Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity; and other connectivity like gyroscope, G-sensor, Light sensor, GPS, and e-compass. The system comes preloaded with the ‘Waveshare’ interface of Asus that includes MyLibrary which is a digital bookstore, MyNet which streams the media to the networked devices, and MyCloud which is a cloud storage and remote access tool.

Eee Pad Transformer has a slight similarity with Lenovo’s Idea Pad U1 Hybrid. However, it is not entirely based on separate Windows 7 machine of $800. Asus hasn’t made the Transformer super sophisticated but it did provide it with a second battery which almost makes the runtime of the tablet double. So, with its double battery option, one gets a runtime of 16 hours which is almost the double of its original runtime of 9.5 hours which is indeed a good buy at a price of $100.