Asus's upcoming tablet, the Transformer Pad 300, is hitting the U.S. market this month on April 22. The new tablet is an upgraded version of Transformer Prime but at a cheaper price.

The Taiwanese company has dropped the "Eee" from its tablet name for the first time. Asus has been using Eee Pad nameplate in its every tablet since the debut of Transformer lineup of tablets. The new tablet will debut in U.S. on April 22. Samsung is also releasing its Galaxy Tab 2 on the same date in the U.S. market.

Asus Transformer Pad 300 features 10.1-inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 1280 X 800 pixels. It has quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor with 1GB of RAM. The non-Eee Asus tablet has 32GB of internal storage. It also supports microSD card up to 32GB.

The upcoming Asus tablet sports 8-megapixel rear snapper with 1080p video recording capability at 30fps. It also has front-facing 1.2-megapixel camera for video calling. Giving superior connectivity offers, it features Wi-Fi, 4G LTE network support, micro-HDMI port, microUSB v2.0 port, Bluetooth v3.0 and assisted GPS.

The tablet gives up to 10 hour of talk time on heavy usage. Of course, it also supports the legendary keyboard dock that also extends the battery life to 15 hours along with featuring a full-sized keyboard with customized android shortcuts. The tablet runs on Android OS 4.x, dubbed Ice Cream Sandwich.

Asus is expected to reveal the price of Transformer Pad 300 on April 22 but certain retailers have already started taking pre-orders for the new tablet. The new tablet is priced at $379-399 based on early orders placed with various U.S. retailers such as BJs and Office Depot.

Asus Transformer Pad 300 is not a flagship tablet for Asus. It is to be noted that Transformer Infinity has almost same specs but higher resolution display (1900 X 1200 pixels). It is also believed that 4G version of Transformer Pad 300 will feature Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset as Tegra 3 does not support 4G LTE data network.

(reported by Johnny Wills, edited by Dave Clark)