PadFone formally unwrapped at MWC: Behold the tablet-frankenphone

First revealed back in May of last year, Asus’s phone-tablet hybrid, the PadFone, has been officially introduced in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress.

At first glance the PadFone appears to be a fairly unassuming device. It runs on Ice Cream Sandwich and has a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED qHD (960 x 540) display, 1.2GHz a dual-core Snapdragon S4 chip with an Adreno 225 GPU, 1GB of RAM, 8MP rear facing shooter with LED flash and f/2.2 autofocus lens and VGA front-facing camera.

Depending on the model, internal storage ranges from 16GB to 64GB, but can be expanded thanks to a microSD slot.

Connectivity options include Bluetooth 4.0, HDMI and can run on both CDMA and GSM (it’s HSPA+ capable) networks, with theoretical download speeds maxing out at 42Mbps.

Things get interesting when — much like the Motorola Atrix and Lapdock combination — the PadFone is combined with Asus’s proprietary tablet dock called the PadFone Station. Slotting the PadFone into the back of the tablet dock, the PadFone is transformed into a 10.1-inch tablet.

When docked the PadFone Station draws its processing power from the PadFone itself and becomes a regular tablet running Android Ice Cream Sandwich with additional “Dynamic Display” technology — which makes the transition between smartphone and tablet feel seamless by mirroring what’s on the screen of the phone on the tablet’s larger 10.1-inch 1280 x 800 resolution display.

The PadFone Station extends the battery life of the PadFone by nine-fold and has its own speakers.

As with Asus’s Transformer line of tablets, you can get a keyboard dock for the PadFone Station. If you’re keeping track, that means you’re docking a phone, into a tablet, onto a keyboard.

There’s no pricing details available, but it should be launching in April.

More

News

Sign up to our newsletter to get the latest in digital insights. sign up

Welcome to Memeburn

Sign up to our newsletter to get the latest in digital insights.