Asustek delayed the U.S. shipments for the dual-screen Taichi ultrabooks

Asustek delayed the U.S. shipments for the dual-screen Taichi ultrabooks which were already available for order from online retailers such as TigerDirect, Newegg and Amazon.

The Taiwanese-made Taichi tablet-laptop hybrid comes with an innovative design and two screens – front and back. It is a laptop and tablet rolled into one unit. It resembles a laptop with its 11.6-inch touch screen, but when the laptop closes, another 11.6 inch back touchscreen activates and the device becomes a tablet.

It was quite rare for a PC maker to manufacture a laptop having displays on both sides of the lid. Asus’ Taichi gained much attention during its first announcement at the Computex trade show in June. They are expected to be shipped in November not long after Windows 8 was already available in tablets and PCs in late October. A spokeswoman from Asus said through an email that U.S. shipments would likely start in December, but maybe held in abeyance later. No specific reasons were disclosed .

Taichi Windows 8 hybrid is sold in two models: the Taichi 21 DH51 with Intel Core i5 processor plus a 128 GB solid-state drive storage, and priced at $1299 on Tigerdirect, Newegg and Amazon.com; the other is the faster Taichi 21 DH71 with an Intel Core i7 processor as well as 256 GB SSD storage. It is priced at $1299 on Amazon.com while it costs $1599 on TigerDirect and Newegg.

Retail sites stopped taking orders and listed the Taichi models as “no stock” or “discontinued”.

The attention-getter Taichi models have screens that are 1920 by 0180 pixels, 45B RAM, 5-megapixel webcam, two USB 3.0 ports, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It weighs 3.0 ports.