I’ve been keeping my eye on the soon to be released EEE Transformer from Asus. It looks like it could be the best of both worlds for me- a simple tablet for when I’m just hanging around or a netbook-ish computer I could do a little work on.
Unfortunately, my main hangup is one of its big selling points- Android. It’ll be outfitted with the Android Honeycomb release, so I don’t know how well it will fit into my style of computing. Pricewise, the tablet itself looks to be at a good target of $400, but the added cost of the docking station ($150 according to the link) pushes the price out there a bit.
I also wonder about these docking stations- how likely is it to be forward compatible with future versions of the tablet? I’d think that a Bluetooth version would be a better long term buy, but then perhaps the device is meant to be “disposable,” with only a 2 or 3 year expected service life. If that’s the case, then I think the price point may need to come down farther.
I doubt I’ll be an early adopter, but I’ll be interested to see if the device gets hacked by Debian or Ubuntu somewhere along the way. Having a package based OS on a tablet could be damn near irresistible.