Asus sent shivers of anticipation down the internet this week when it gave a sneak peak at the next generation of its Eee Pad Transformer at AsiaD in Hong Kong. In an on stage interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, the chairman of Asus, Jonney Shih revealed a 10” tablet running Google’s newest version of Android.

The device will sport Nvidia’s quad core processor, with USB, mini HDMI ports and an SD card slot. Additionally, it is expected to boast a battery life of a whopping fourteen and a half hours. Apparently, the tablet, which is being called the Transformer Prime, will be 8.3 mm thick.

Unfortunately, further specifications are scant at present  - Shih teased that more information and release dates will have to wait until the middle of November with the formal announcement of Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich.

According to Engadget, Shih also commented that smartphones, tablets and notebooks were all critical to the company’s success, with “none taking a backseat.” This was in response to a similar question we’ve been posing of late, around the impact that the uptake of tablets and smartphones is having on notebooks.

"We believe that this a very critical time, transitioning from the personal computing era to the ubiquitous cloud computing era," Shih commented. Asus should know – it’s been at the forefront of embracing the cloud. Its original Eee PC relied heavily on cloud based functionality.

This kind of revelation is the breath of fresh air we’ve been hoping for, particularly as Android 10.1” tablets have started to seem all a bit samey of late, with every manufacturer jumping on the Android bandwagon.

It also is evidence of a point raised within our recent interview with Samsung – that tablets would only become faster and more powerful, with dual-core processors moving to quad-core one. Truthfully, we just didn’t expect it to happen this quickly.