Asus planning to move a lot of Prime tablets in December

The ASUS Eee Pad Transformer tablet/netbook hybrid has been one of the bright spots in the Android tablet ecosystem for 2011, and now it appears that ASUS is confident they will continue that success with the upcoming Transformer Prime. According to industry supply sources, ASUS has ordered enough parts to ship 350,000 units in December alone.

While not lofty numbers by the standard of the industry-leading iPad 2, for any other tablet 350,000 is a very aggressive number to ship, especially if Amazon’s ship date of December 16th is correct. That would leave them just under half a month to move the units, although the launch was delayed a couple of weeks so that the Transformer Prime would ship with Ice Cream Sandwich.

ASUS was caught off guard by the success of the original Eee Pad Transformer. They had planned to ship 300,000 units in Q2 of this year, but sold out in the first week and had to scramble to get more units into the retail chain. Despite weeks of scarcity, ASUS sold 400,000 Eee Pad Transformers in the first 2 months of availability, and by mid-summer expected to sell over 3 million of the tablets in 2011.

The Transformer Prime is well positioned for success this holiday season, as it will be the first tablet to market with a quad-core Tegra 3 CPU and ICS. What do you guys think, are ASUS's goals too lofty, or could they be underestimating demand once again? How many of you are thinking of picking one of these up? Let us know in the comments section!



source: DigiTimes via electronista