The ASUS Eee Pad release date is set for July of this year. ASUS‘ CEO Jerry Shen announced this at a conference in Taiwan.

The Eee Pad is positioned to compete head on with Apple’s iPad. It offers distinct features that are missing on the iPad such as full Adobe Flash support, USB ports and an integrated webcam. In addition, it features Google’s open-source lightweight Android operating system. This also seems to be an obvious choice seeing Apple chose its lightweight iPhone OS over its heavyweight Mac OSX to run on the iPad. Finally, its graphics will be supported by NVidia’s Tegra chipset, a standard for mobile devices now.

ASUS expects the introduction of tablet as a new segment in consumer computing will reduce netbook demand by 10 to 20%. For that reason, ASUS wants to have its slice of the tablet pie before it reduces its own netbook sales.

The ASUS Eee Pad will not surprisingly be priced around the iPad’s price of $499 USD. ASUS expects to ship at least 300,000 Eee Pads by the end of 2010. These are ambitious numbers, but ASUS did it before with its netbooks and the T91 and T101 tablets.

We were not far off with our artist rendering (see picture above). This actual photo of the Eee Pad went up on blogs this week, looking good right? We can’t wait!

We have been waiting on the launch of the ASUS Eee PC T101H or ASUS Eee PC T101MT, or 10.1″ model of the Asus tablet for over a year now. For many potential customers, the T91 with its 8.9″ screen was simply too small to justify its price. With the passing of the  T101MT through the FCC, all rumors and gossip can come to an end. Before a new electronics product launches, it has to be checked for consumer safety by the FCC. Most products pass without any hardship and therefore you can usually expect a product to launch soon after the FCC has seen it. The current expectations in the blogosphere and around industry analysts is that the T101MT will be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2010 and will hit stores in Q2 of 2010.

T101MT Specifications (unconfirmed)

• Screen: 10.1″ LED Backlight / Capacitive Multi-Touch Panel
• OS: Windows 7 Home Premium (32 bit)
• Resolution: 1024 x 600 (WSVGA)
• Battery: Li-polymer, 5 hours runtime
• Processor: Intel Atom Z520 – 1.33GHz
• Memory: 1Gb (DDR2); 2Gb Maximum
• Storage: SSD 16Gb + 16Gb SD Card (included)
• Online Storage: 500Gb
• Audio: HD / Stereo Speakers / Digital Array Mic
• Wireless: 802.11 b/g/n
• Bluetooth: Yes
• Camera: 0.3 Megapixel Built-in
• Color: Black / Silver
• Weight: 1.08 g
• GPS: ?

And here’s a video of the protoype T101H:

Industry insiders report that ASUS will be launching a new device named the Eee Pad in the 3rd quarter of 2010. The device which will look similar to ASUS’ latest T91 offering, albeit without a keyboard and will sport a 4 to 7-inch capacitive touch screen display with multi-touch as well as haptic feedback.

The device will be directly competing against the Apple Tablet which has just been delayed until the 2nd quarter of 2010.

More details to follow up in a few hours.

(Picture above is an artist rendering.)