Asus to ship 30% fewer tablets this year?

The entire tablet industry is having problems. Phablets are everywhere and are cannibalizing tablet sales. In addition, tablets are not like smartphones where specs are constantly improved and there is strong demand for updated models. Amid this weak market for tablets, Asus expects to ship 6 to 7 million slates this year, which is a drop of 30% from last year. In  2014, Asus shipped a total of 9.4 million slates.

Tablet shipments have been soft this year for Asus from the get-go. The company couldn't even reach its Q1 and Q2 shipping targets of 1.8 million and 1.2 million tablets respectively. Asus shipped 2.5 million tablets for the first 6 months of 2015, down 39% year-over-year. That breaks down into tablet shipments of 1.5 million for the first quarter, and 1 million for the second quarter.

Just the other day, we told you that the Asus ZenPad S 8 Z580C is now available in the U.S. Priced at $200, the tablet can be purchased from BestBuy, B&H and Adorama. The 8-inch screen has a 1536 x 2048 resolution, which works out to a pixel density of 320ppi. The tablet is powered by the Intel Atom Z3530 chipset and includes a back to front camera combo of 5MP/2MP.

At $130, the budget priced ZenPad 8 Z380C can be pre-ordered from B&H and Adorama. This tablet's 8-inch glass has a much lower resolution of 800 x 1280 and a pixel density of 189ppi. An Intel x3-C3200 SoC powers the tablet and features a quad-core 1.2GHz CPU. 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of native storage are inside.

source: DigiTimes