Speaking at AsiaD, Asus CEO Jonney Shih made two surprise announcements. The long awaited Transformer Prime and the PadFone will both ship in Q1 and more details can be found past the break. (Hint: we have quad core and Ice Cream Sandwich!)

When the Honeycomb touting Asus Eee Pad Transformer was released earlier this year, it became a massive hit (for an Android tablet) and sold out in quicktime. Rumours have been abound for months that a Tegra 3 powered successor would follow by the end of the year, and Shih confirmed that. Despite the teaser video that surfaced yesterday, the announcement that he made came as a shock during his AsiaD interview with Walt Mossberg. The Transformer Prime is the first device to be announced with Nvidia’s quad core Tegra 3 chip, which should allow for excellent gaming and unmatched tablet processing power. It has a 10.1 inch screen with a svelte 8.3mm figure when docked with in its keyboard attachment. The design is reminiscent of the new Zenbook line and ports include a mini-HDMI and SD card slot. It is believed that the device will ship with Honeycomb, but Shih went on to say that it is expected that Ice Cream Sandwich will be available for tablets before 2012. The official announcement will take place on November 8th and we will be the first users of this domain to bring you coverage from that.

Shih also confirmed that the bizarre PadFone, shown off in prototype form earlier this year, will in fact ship with Ice Cream Sandwich on both parts. This was predicted by Engadget at launch in May as, with the unique form factor and design of the device, it would be sensible to have a common OS between the phone and the tablet. Jonney confirmed that the PadFone will ship in Q1 2012 but no other details were announced. We should find out more at the same November 8th conference but we will keep you posted on news as soon as we get it.