Last year, Samsung unveiled the ATIV Q, an innovative convertible tablet that could boot in either Windows 8 or Android. For reasons still unclear, it never made it to market. There were some suggestions that Microsoft blocked the release using some patents it owned. Earlier this year, ASUS unveiled its own dual-booting convertible tablet at CES 2014. The ASUS Transformer Book Duet TD300 was billed as “the world’s first quad-mode, dual-OS laptop and tablet convertible” as it could run as an Android laptop, a Windows laptop, an Android tablet or a Windows tablet. Like the Samsung ATIV Q, there are now doubts that it will ever launch.
According to Digitimes, ASUS was planning to launch it in Asia and European markets sometime this quarter. A U.S. launch was to follow in the second quarter. It now appears instead that ASUS has put those plans on hold or even cancelled the Duet due to “resistance from Google.” The report cites China’s Economic Daily News as the original source but provides no additional details as to what Google’s specific concerns could be.
The ASUS Transformer Book Duet TD300 was to have been offered in different configurations with a choice of processor, a 13.3-inch Full HD (1920×1080) multitouch IPS display and storage configurations that included a 1TB hard drive in the base. It also had the ability to quickly (about 4 seconds according to ASUS) switch from Android to Windows on the fly. Its lowest configuration was set to go for US$599.
For its part, ASUS had no comment to make on the story.
Too bad. I was looking forward to getting my hands on this.