Sounds like a good plan. Asus used to make some nice looking smartphones but they've been quiet for a while.

Well they have a pretty good reputation amongst system builders and if I recall correctly they've made some decent laptops for others. As a marque though they aren't very well known to Joe public. Niece was looking for a laptop a few months ago and I suggested looking at the Asus ones along with the usual similar priced HP and others. Happily came away with the Asus, seems fairly solid, runs cool with an ok looking panel and dare I say it…had I bit of design flair too.

When something goes into production it is usually cheaper to make lots and lots of them – the economies of scale come into play. So over the lifetime of the Nexus 7, should it be a success, ASUS will be able to make the devices for lower costs while the price to the end users may reduce at a slower rate.

So what you're saying is that despite being “@ cost” now, Asus is playing the long game and expecting to come out ahead over the lifetime of the product? If so, then that seems like a sensible, albeit risky (cough, cough, Apple's legal department), strategy.

Got to say that the big plus for Asus surely has to be that they're going to get a better/closer relationship with Google out of this. If so, then it stands to reason that future Asus devices (e.g. whatever comes after the current Transformer Infinity) will have better implementations of future Android OS's, e.g. Key Lime, etc. Which - from my point of view - makes it even more of a certainty that the replacement for my much-liked Transformer tablet will also be from Asus.

Although if Asus UK is reading this, then a trade-in programme for my TF101 would make it a dead certainty! :mrgreen:

I quite like Asus - their support isn't the best, but I've had few problems with their motherboards and video cards. I've even given thought to replacing my (misbehaving) Cisco E4200 router with one of Asus' new 802.11n ones (56U or 66U).

It's a pitty that Asus couldn't have squeezed a Micro SD card slot into the price. I'm sure it could of been done.

Yeah, no memory slot is a bit of a bummer, though I suspect in the push for the cloud Google may have defined the specs.

Would have bought one if it had more storage or an sd slot. Yeh cloud storage - fair enough, but it doesn't work well with the play store does it? I mean you'd have to keep uninstalling and reinstalling? Pretty easy to fill up even 16gb with movies and music.

It works *very well* with the play store and that's the point, if you rent your films from the play store they're streamed so no space taken up there (apart from temporary files, but linux and by extension android tends to be good about removing those). If you use Google Music then you buy music through that or upload your own and have more available than you ever would with a microSD, and again it's a streaming service so only a little space is used temporarily.

The only situations under which 16GB isn't enough are if you download a ton of games (fine, that's legitimate), or don't use Google services as is intended. What's a real shame is that Google Music hasn't spread to the UK yet, you have to sign up using a US proxy though after that it's fine for use all over the world.

Nexus devices beginning with the Nexus S haven't included a microSD card slot, so that's one and a half years now Google have been gently nudging people to move away from microSDs, unfortunately they haven't been pushing their cloud solutions through quickly enough or advertising them heavily which they really need to do right now to make the Nexus 7 a success.

AS mentioned near the bottom of the last thread, it has usb otg so it's very possible it will be modded to mount a usb drive pretty soon.