Asus, which set the netbooks market on fire with its Eee PCs, has some exciting new products coming up for release this year. Leaked slides of the company’s product roadmap for the U.S. show it is planning to introduce a new netbook with a 12-inch display and Nvidia’s Ion graphics chip and a tablet PC with multi-touch capability.

The new netbooks are expected to be priced from $300 to $500, says the Netbook News website.

Despite an overall slowdown in PC sales due to the weak economic environment, the netbook market has been going gangbusters. Sales of netbooks grew 40 percent in the second quarter, almost twice that of the growth rate of larger notebook PCs, says DisplaySearch, a research arm of the NPD Group.

Asus’ 1201N netbook is likely to have a 12-inch display, an Atom N270 processor, 2 GB RAM and 250 GB storage. It will also include Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capability and at $500 will be among the company’s premium products. The netbook is expected to be available in mid-October.

Around that time, Asus will also have a convertible tablet PC running Windows 7, says Netbook News. The $550 T91 convertible tablet is expected to come with a 32 GB solid state drive.

Check out a slide of the Asus Eee PC roadmap for details about upcoming netbook configurations and the company’s planned releases for the year.

[via Engadget]

Photo: Asus Eee PC (Axel Buhrmann/Flickr)