As one of the few PC producers in the world, ASUS was able to defy an industry-wide downward trend in sales with its well-received tablets,  Electronista reports. Unofficial sales figures mention 300,000 tablets shipping per month with the Eee Pad Transformer being responsible for the bulk of those sales. Sales of Motorola’s XOOM were purportedly 3x less and sales of RIM’s PlayBooks almost 2x less.

It seems ASUS took the right step when they, as one of the first, entered the touchscreen tablet market a few years ago. Let’s see how the future unfolds for ASUS. Will they become a market leader in tablets and overthrow the kingpin Apple? What do you think? Tell us in the comments!

ASUS has just added a new product page for the Asus Eee Pad Slider, hinting that it may be shipping soon, PC World reports from several sources.

The Slider sports a standard tablet touchscreen display with a thin slide out chiclet keyboard giving users the choice to have a keyboard when they need it and put it away when they don’t. It will feature Android 3.1 upgradeable to Android 3.2 and reports tell us that it there will be one 16GB and one 32GB version of it mimicking the product categorization on storage capacity Apple introduced with its first Apple tablet, the iPad.

The SL101 Slider is expected in September 2011, but we never know with regular delays in tablet shipments.

Here are the full specs from ASUS:

• NVIDIA® Tegra™ 2 1.0GHz dual-core CPU for excellent multitasking & HD video playback
• Android™ 3.1 Honeycomb OS(3.2 upgradable) with Adobe® Flash® support*
• Full QWERTY keyboard and built-in USB port. Preloaded Polaris® Office® for mobile productivity
• Ultra-wide 178⁰ viewing angle IPS panel protected by scratch resistant Corning® Gorilla® Glass.
• USB port, MicroSD Card Reader, and one year unlimited ASUS WebStorage for easy sharing & expandability
• Supreme SRS Sound with max bass response

In addition to the forthcoming ASUS Eee Pad which is released in July and will run Android, ASUS will also be releasing a Windows 7-enabled tablet.

ASUS is like everyone else unsure about what direction the market is moving in and betting on two horses. The difference is really between running a lightweight but limited web-focused operating system like the iPhone OS or Android vs. running heavyweight operating systems that run advanced software applications like Windows 7 and Mac OSX do.

The question is what the people that buy these things want. Just browsing and running basic applications from the app stores, or actually doing advanced work.

Due to the nature of Windows 7, it’s to expect that ASUS will come with a higher-spec device than the Eee Pad.

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!

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.)