First look: Asus Eee Slate review and Eee Pad review

   The four tablets Asus showed off at CES today aren’t just unusual form factors; they’re also packing in performance.

Asus Eee Pad MeMO

   The 7-inch Eee Pad MeMO is a fairly standard Qualcomm Snapdragon-based 7-inch Android tablet, but like all Asus’ Android tablets it’s running Honeycomb and it comes with a capacitive stylus and a Media Note application you can use for handwritten notes. It also has a MeMIC ‘media phone extender’ (which we’d usually call a stereo headset) and a price tag between $499 and $699 when it comes out in June.

Asus Eee Pad Slider and Eee Pad Transformer 

   If you want a 10-inch Android slate, Asus thinks you want a keyboard to go with it. The Eee Pad Slider looks like various Intel concept tablet PCs of years gone by, with a keyboard that slides out from under the screen. But it still weighs in at just under two pounds and less than two-thirds of an inch thick.

   The slimmer Transformer has a separate keyboard that packs in enough batteries to give you a predicted 16 hours of battery life. There are also USB ports and a card reader, plus you can fold the keyboard over the screen to use it as a protective cover rather than needing a case.

   They both have a dual-core Tegra 2 processor, which Asus chairman Jonney Shih boasts has around twice the performance of the ARM-based Apple A4 chip in the iPad and what he claims will be “the fastest Flash video performance”. The Transformer starts at $399 (without the base station) or $699 with it and the Slider will sell between $499 and $799 for different versions (they’ll be on sale in April and May).

Asus Eee Slate EP121

   But Asus is also bringing out a 12-inch Windows tablet and unlike all the Atom-based tablets that are appearing, the Eee Slate EP121 has a mainstream processor in it; for $999 you get a Core i5 CPU, 64GB SSD, 2 megapixel webcam, HDMI – and a Wacom digitiser pen that means we could actually use the handwriting recognition built into Windows 7 Home Premium to write and send emails (plus an optional wireless Bluetooth keyboard).

   Shih claims it’s “the most powerful tablet, with no compromises” and showed us Photoshop CS5 running with a 1080p copy of The A Team playing in the background. You don’t have to wait as long for the Windows tablet either; it will be on sale this month as Microsoft pushes its partners to catch up with Android.