ASUS Looking to Challenge Apple for Tablet Dominance

While the ASUS name may be well-recognized by visitors of HotHardware, it's still a relative unknown in North America to those who don't eat tech for breakfast. This, despite the fact that the company really does produce some compelling products. Let's not forget that it was ASUS which spear-headed the entire netbook movement. ASUS has proven itself to be a bit of a visionary in that way, much like Apple - so why not try to catch up?

Well - if you're going to say you're planning to catch up to Apple in terms of sales, you might as well admit you're crazy and talk about being the first to walk to the moon. ASUS is hardly ignorant of that, so its ambitions are a bit more modest: it wants the silver medal in 2013. Between its tablets and notebooks, ASUS hopes to beat out the likes of Amazon and Samsung to secure the second spot in shipment numbers - a lofty goal, but not outside the realm of possibility.

Currently, Samsung sits in the #2 spot where tablets are concerned, responsible for 18.4% of shipments in the third quarter. Amazon trails behind with 9.0%, while ASUS sits in #4 with 8.6%. Given these numbers, it's not difficult to see the potential of ASUS overtaking Amazon, but catching up to Samsung? That's going to be a bit rough. But - if we're counting notebooks and tablets, things become a bit easier.

Even so, the challenge ASUS faces here is immense. It does have a couple of great things going for it, however. This past summer, its Nexus 7 tablet earned our coveted Editor's Choice award, and with ASUS still fresh in people's minds, its Zenbook Prime left us rather impressed as well. In my opinion, ASUS has long made quality notebooks, but now that it's finally starting to become recognized on these shores, the sky's the limit.

The mobile market is rarely boring, but 2013 has just been given an interesting boost now that we'll be eagle-eyeing ASUS to see if it can reach its lofty goal.