As the year comes closer to an end, Asus has just released its financial results for the third quarter of 2011 and the news are pretty good. The Taiwan based company managed to beat the forecast for net profits and in the process uncovered some fascinating figures about their product shipments. So it turns out that Asus shipped 1.3 million Eee PC netbooks in Q3, adding to the previous sells to make a total of 3.6 million. During the same period, Asus also shipped 800,000 Eee Pad tablets. This is interesting. Despite the modern trend and the frenzy caused by tablets it seems that netbooks are still high on consumers’ lists and won’t be replaced that easily.

And apparently there’s more reason for people to turn to Asus to buy their Netbooks, since Samsung is seemingly abandoning Netbooks in favor of producing the so called next best thing, Ultrabooks. That leaves Netbook making to just Acer and Asus. At the moment, Asus is the number one Netbook maker, holding 22% of the market and 1.7 million Netbook sales the last quarter.

Why are things moving so slowly with tablets then, you might ask. Well we honestly couldn’t tell you, since we think the Eee Pad Transformer Prime is pretty hot. It’s the world’s first quad-core Tegra 3 and is available with a keyboard dock that can transform the tablet into a laptop. It comes for $499 with 32GB of storage and has a 8-megapixel camera and a brand new SuperIPS+ display. Asus predicts that the amount of tablets sold next year will amount to about 1.8 million. It’s pretty bold, but the tablet hasn’t been out long so who knows?!

It’s true that Netbook is what got Asus known in the first place, but apparently since the market is changing direction, investing all efforts into a wonder tablet might not be such a bad idea.

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