We’ve already talked a bit about a mystery Asus tablet only known as ZT500KL. Now we’re seeing a ZT581KL which appears on the surface (no pun intended) to be part of a series.
Our initial thought with the ZT500KL is that it was going to be a “T” ZenPad Transformer. We were trying to make sense of the ZT aspect of the model naming. However, this ZT581KL has altered out thoughts.
It is possible, although unlikely that Asus would be making an 8-inch ZenPad Transformer. We say unlikely because the last 8-inch keyboard style device they made was the T90 Chi which was 8.9-inches which is essentially a 9-inch device. Anything less than that makes it very difficult to make a usable and functional keyboard. In fact I believe the T90 was very short lived and was likely a hard sell. Why would Asus go back to such a small form factor? Chances are they wouldn’t.
So with the ZT581KL we are back to the drawing board. If we say T Series, it will be interesting to think what that really means. It has been a while since Asus put out a Windows tablet, but VivoBook and Transformer Book has been their branding for Windows tablets. ZenPad has been about Android and I doubt they will starting mixing these products under the ZenPad brand.
So let’s look at what we are confident about. We know these are Snapdragon powered with 4G LTE enabled. That’s the easy part. The “500” in ZT500KL to us means 10-inch and the “581” in ZT581KL to us means 8-inch. Why is it not “580” instead? Afterall the original ZenPad tablets did not use a “1” and were listed as Z580, Z300, Z380, Z370, Z170, etc. There were no “1” models which we believe is usually reserved for a second generation product. We’ve also seen ZD300C which was the ZenPad 10 bundle with the Audio Dock keyboard. “D” makes sense for Dock. We simply cannot come up with a logical explanation for the “T” in these new mystery ZenPad tablets. If you have a guess, please add one in a comment below please!