Asus’s Eee Pad Slider is joining the rare but growing group of tablets slated for an Android 4.0 upgrade.
The latest version of Google’s mobile operating system, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, has rolled out to only a handful of the many Android tablets on the market.
Asus has been on the receiving end of a good chunk of that small set of devices, proving what the company has boasted about for a while – that it has a solid, positive relationship with Google.
The manufacturer has been reported to be on the short list of companies that Google will tap to manufacture the official Nexus tablet, an Android device that would get official support from Google and become the defining Android tablet.
The Eee Pad Slider is a 10.1-inch tablet with a 1280×800 resolution and an Nvidia Tegra 2 1.2 GHz dual-core processor. It also sports 1 GB of RAM and 32 GB of internal memory. That puts it perfectly in line with the other Android devices that have received the Ice Cream Sandwich boost.
Ice Cream Sandwich is now powering 4.9% of active Android devices, according to the company’s most recently released official statistics.
Google hopes Android 4.0 will be a big reset button on the mobile platform, since it has much stricter hardware guidelines that it hopes will help prevent fragmentation in the future. This is a goal we’ve heard in previous rollouts of Android, so we’ll see if it actually is realized this time.
