Asustek Computer Inc (華碩電腦) said on Thursday that it will launch a tablet computer priced at NT$30,370 early in the new year, as part of the world’s fifth-largest PC maker’s efforts to meet the demand of the high-end market.
The Taiwan-based company will begin selling the 12-inch tablet device running the Windows 7 operating system in the first quarter of next year, although the local market is not included in the first allocation of units, Asustek’s senior product manager Jose Liao (廖逸翔) said at a press conference.
“Our tablet PCs will be available in Taiwan in March or April next year,” Liao said.
At the same press conference, Asustek announced the launch of a series of lightweight laptops that are being sold during the Dec. 4 to Dec. 12 ICT Month technology fair.
Three-hundred-and-fifty companies, including giants such as Acer Inc (宏碁), Asustek, Sony Corp, HTC Corp (宏達電) and Epson Imaging Devices Corp, are being represented at the fair.
Many companies are expected to offer discounts to consumers attending the fair, which has free entry, according to the organizer.
Asustek is expecting to sell 13,000 devices at the show, including regular notebooks, netbooks and e-readers, a gain of 30 percent compared to last year’s show, Asustek’s general sales manager Kevin Lin (林福能) said.
In addition, the company’s total shipments of notebooks is forecast to grow by at least 20 percent this year, although the actual number will not be disclosed until closer to the end of the year, Lin said.
Asked about notebook prospects in the first quarter of next year, Lin said they are not bad because of strong demand in the Chinese market.
People will begin to spend their money after receiving their traditional “red envelopes,” monetary gifts exchanged during the Lunar New Year holiday, he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day