Talk of the town
While it probably stays under the radar of anyone not directly involved in the education sector, BETT is easily the UK's biggest remaining tech show. It's also straight after CES, so it's not uncommon to see companies fly their new shiny things over the pond for a first European reveal at the education tech show.
That's exactly what happened with ASUS, which has unveiled its new range of Android tablets at CES. UK PR dude John Swatton had grabbed the Slider and Transformer, jumped on the first flight out of Vegas, and went straight to Olympia, without passing Go.
In the TV interview below we have a look at the devices themselves and talk a bit about ASUS's tablet strategy, including how John thinks they can coexist with his company's successful EeePC netbook range.
The units on show were running Android 2.2, and towards the end of the interview we discussed whether or not they will be running Android 3.0 - Honeycomb - by the time they launch, and when that will be.
Swatton appeared to contradict the official announcement when he said in the interview that they're likely to launch with Android 2.3. Since we filmed the interview he has subsequently spoken to us to clarify the matter. In essence, ASUS plans to launch the devices - Transformer in Q2 and Slider in Q3 - with Honeycomb, but he wasn't 100 percent sure Honeycomb would be ready in time when we did the interview, which is why he erred on the side of caution.
