Workers at Asus seem to be having happy holidays and not concerned about the pending trademark infringement lawsuit from Hasbro. Some preorders of the Asus Transformer Prime models are being shipped.
The Asus design staff is shown in a YouTube video making a Christmas Tree out of gift boxes. They do not appear too worried about the trademark lawsuit.
Asus spokesman Chang Wie-ming said Saturday, that production of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime will continue as usual and not be affected by the pending lawsuit from Hasbro.
Chang said that internal assessments found no "patent" infringement, according to Focus Taiwan News Channel. It's hard to tell if something got lost in the translation because the lawsuit is regarding trademark infringement and not patent infringement.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database shows a trademark for "Transformers Prime", which is plural and filed on April 7, 2010 for "toy action figures; toy vehicles; toy robots covertible into other visual toy forms; board games; parlor games" held by Hasbro.
Asus filed a trademark for the Eee Pad on November 16, 2010. Technically, the name for the super quad-core tablet is Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime.
Best Buy sent out notices that they were shipping Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablets from California on December 23 for preorders. Best Buy has been getting flack for not delivering holiday goods on time. There was also a reported glitch on the Best Buy website that showed, for a short time, that it would ship in a day. The website has been updated to show Asus Transformer Prime in "gray" indicating that the item is sold-out online.
The Asus Transformer Prime has a quad-core processor. It is 8.3mm thin and weighs 586g, which is a bit heavier than the Tab 10.1, but lighter than the iPad 2. Features include, a mini-HDMI output, a microSD slot, a 1280 x 800 Super IPS+ Gorilla Glass touchscreen, a 1GB of RAM, a GPS, a gyroscope, a SonicMaster audio, a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera and an 8MP camera with 1080p video recording. There is special keyboard dock that turns the Asus Transformer Prime into what looks like the Asus Zenbook.
I can't wait for this to be ready.