Asus has just announced the latest version of its previously awkward Padfone. But this time around it seems that the hardware might live up to previous promises.
The new device — which allows you to dock a smartphone into a bigger screen to create a tablet, just like the older versions — certainly delivers on specs. The phone offers a 5-inch 1080p screen (that’s 441 pixels per inch), a quad-core 1.7GHz Snapdragon 600 chip with an Adreno 320 GPU, 2GB of RAM and either 32GB or 64GB of built-in storage. In terms of connectivity, you can expect EDGE, GPRS, GSM, WCDMA, LTE and DC-HSPA+, as well as the usual Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC.
The phone packs a 13-megapixel shooter and a front-facing 2-megapixel camera. A 2400mAh battery should keep it ticking along through 19 hours of 3G talk time. To round things off, it’s finally running an up-to-date operating system, in the shape of Android 4.2.
Then there’s the tablet dock: it has a 10.1-inch screen with resolution of 1920×1200 — up from 1280×800 in the last version — and has enough battery capacity to more than double the runtime of the phone.
The device won’t initially be available in Australia or the US, but it will cost the equivalent of $US1200 elsewhere. We’ll go hands-on soon, so check back to see what we think of it up close.