Asus Sticking with Windows 7 Tablets Against iPad, Android Army

Asus will continue to build Window 7 tablets, calling Microsoft’s OS a worthy competitor to the Apple iPad and the army of Android tablets on the market. An Asus official told TechRadar that the company gets a lot of inquiries from the consumer and business market for Windows 7 tablets, so it will continue making them as long as that demand remains.

Julie Cheng, a product management specialist at Asus, said her company’s customers “don’t want Apple and they don’t want Android because they just simply want Windows – they’re used to it. There are still demands for Windows solutions.”

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t seems like Asus is trying to cover all its bases, given its announcement at CES this year of three Android tablets (including the Asus Eee Pad Transformer tablet and laptop combo), as well as a Windows 7 slate, the 12.1-inch Eee Slate EP121. There’s even speculation that Asus may be planning a Chrome OS netbook for June.

Asus’s broad strategy to meet Windows 7 tablet demands, and also build Android tablets, may help it dominate a niche market, but many in the industry are still highly skeptical of Windows 7’s tablet fit. My PC World colleague Melissa J. Perenson took a look at the potential for Windows 7 tablets outside of vertical business markets and concluded that it’s now or never for these devices, because “once consumers shift to a more visual, finger-friendly operating system, Windows could lose eyeballs permanently — interoperability be damned.” Colleague Jason Cross put it a bit more directly: Windows 7 tablets are a terrible idea.

What do you think? Is there room for Windows 7 in the already-crowded tablet space? Or are Android and iPad (perhaps even webOS?) apps where it’s at?

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