Remember when at the end of 2011 ASUS had some legal problems with Hasbro, that wanted trademark for the Transformer branding, saying that people may associated the quad core Prime tablet with the Transformer robots? Well, now a federal judge has ruled that ASUS Transformer Prime doesn’t infringe any Hasbro Transformers trademark, so ASUS is safe from Autobot attack.
The judge is saying that people won’t confuse a tablet with Hasbro cartoons and toys, since they have nothing in common. The same authorities mentioned that Hasbro also waited a bit too long to file the suit. Another aspect that came out of the documents of the suit are some less than impressive sales. The court filings reveal that the pre-orders for the Tegra 3 tablet reached 2,000 units a month ago, which is a big letdown for a huge name like ASUS.
Add to that 80,000 unites delivered to retailers worldwide and you get a very tiny portion of the success that the original Transformer was, shipping 400k units a month last summer. Not to mention the Kindle Fire that has been flying off the shelves in the millions. Of course, these are merely figures extracted from a document where ASUS may choose to only reveal part of its marketing scheme and plans, so we may not have the entire picture here and shipments/sales could be bigger…
