ASUS Eee Pad Transformer with Kal-El and ‘Android 4.0’ expected to cost $499

ASUS CEO Jerry Shen says he has no plans to cut the price of the Eee Pad Transformer and will launch the second generation Transformer with a $499 sum, according to DigiTimes. The second generation Eee Pad Transformer is expected to feature NVIDIA's five-core Kal-El System-on-Chip. Shen also reportedly said that Android tablets will see improvements with the upcoming Android 4.0 release excepted before the end of the year -- a reference Ice Cream Sandwich presumably, since Google has never officially referred to it as version 4.0 (the latest Honeycomb build is 3.2.1).

Shen expects Android 4.0 to put the Google tablets on equal footing with Apple. As such, he sees no need for ASUS to follow the lead of its competitors who have recently trimmed prices on their own tablet offerings (or abandoned them completely). Unfortunately, people don't buy a tablet based on what its OS can do, but for what they can do with the tablet. Apple knows this and Amazon's Jeff Bezos seems to understand it as well given the positioning of the company's content rich $199 Kindle Fire. Hopefully Shen and the rest of the me-too Android tablet manufactures can figure this out too.