ASUS PadFone : Features, Review & More

Asus, one name you would associate with concepts, risk taker, innovation and many more. They have really made it this time by their new launch PadFone. It gives you a full-fledged functionality of a phone tablet and a laptop. Now you don’t have to buy different gadgets for your different needs, Asus PadFone has it all. It has an Android phone, a tablet like docking station and furthers a keyboard dock to convert it into a laptop.

Design and Build

The PadFone itself is unique and cool in its own way. The Gorilla glass, sleek aluminium body it quite much resembles an iPhone. Just 9.2mm in width, it’s quite light for your pocket having a weight of 129 g. It has all the basic utilities like, a big 4.3 inch display, a volume rocker at the perfect place, a micro USB port, Micro HDMI and three contacts of docking station.

Now let’s talk about the Phone’s tablet part. The tablet is nothing but a docking station for phone with a 10.1 inch display and weighs about 724g. On tablet you get a front facing camera while the rear one is of the phone itself. A power button, a headphone jack and a volume rocker is also present which are connected internally to the phone. There is a 6,600mAh battery on the docket which starts charging as soon as the phone is connected to it. To convert it into a laptop we have a keyboard which attaches to the dock. The keyboard has two USB ports, a card reader and one more battery pack. Along with this economy PadFone, we also get a stylus which could be used as a Bluetooth head set and you can easily make calls and receive calls by just holding it to your ear. Must say, a very nice idea and game me a feeling of being in a Bond movie.

The build and finish of the PadFone are really impressive and same goes for the accessories that accompany it.

Interface

It is bundled with Android 4.0.3with Super AMOLED screen .The picture quality and videos look very crisp and clear. The notification bar is customized by ASUS and gives a handy scrolling bar instead. Asus has customized and improved some of UI options and will transform completely into tablet mode as soon as the phone is docked.

The shortcuts and widgets give a different picture in tablet mode when compared to phone. . The PadFone is powered by a Qualcomm S4 MSM8960 SoC running at 1.5GHz. This dual-core CPU is based on the new 28nm ‘Krait’ architecture and features the Adreno 225 for graphics. This is a powerful chip and it reflects in the benchmarks. Linpack returned a single threaded score of 100MFLOPS while in the multi-threaded score returned 180MFLOPS. AnTuTu also gave us a high score of 6941pts, which is very good.

There is a section called ‘Pad Only’ is for application to be used in tablet mode. The QWERTY keyboard features shortcuts for locking the screen and going to the settings, and the track pad even features gestures for browsing through menus, just like on the Transformer tablet.

You can easily switch from phone mode to tablet mode without any restarting application. This happens only in one condition that ‘Dynamic Display switch List’ is enabled. You can easily choose your app to be listed in Dynamic display Switch category for example the Browser does the switch very beautifully. Asus also gives you the flexibility of using its own keyboard, which is not too bad, or the stock ICS keyboard. Most OEMs force you to use their keyboard alone, so it's nice when you have a choice.

Media

You can sort your songs by Recent, Albums, Artists, Songs, Playlists or Genre. With fresh look of media player even get audio enhancements by default and a support of FLAC files. Undoubtedly the volume is very good.

Connectivity

The PadFone is a quad-band GSM device, but supports only two bands for 3G: 900 and 1200. It still does 21Mbps down and 5.76Mbps up.

Camera

The 8MP LED flash is pretty good and evenly illuminates a dark area. Panorama mode works very well too. Pictures look even better outdoors in natural light. Touch to focus is present as well along with touch to capture, face detection etc. The PadFone only has a VGA front camera, whereas the station packs in a 1.3MP cam.

Verdict and Price in India

The Asus PadFone retails for Rs. 65,000 and as part of the package, you get the phone, the station, the keyboard and the stylus headset. This makes it the most expensive smart phone in India with all the added innovation and creativity.

Specifications

Display
Form Factor	Bar
Screen Type	Super AMOLED Capacitive Touchscreen
Screen Size	4.3 inches
Screen Resolution	540 x 960 pixels
Number of Colours	16M
Processor
Processor	Qualcomm 8260A Dual-core
Speed	1.5 GHz
Memory
Internal Memory	32GB EMMC, 1GB LPDDR2
Camera Features
Sensor Resolution	8 MP, 3264 x 2448 pixels
Front facing camera	0.3MP
General Features
OS	Android
Version	4.0
Bluetooth Features	Yes, with A2DP
Messaging	SMS(threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Email, IM
GPS	Yes, with A-GPS support
USB Connector	Yes
Available Colours	Black
Carrier Networks
2G	GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G	HSDPA 900 / 2100
Data
GPRS	Yes
EGPRS or EDGE	Yes
WiFi	Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
Body
Dimensions	128 x 65.4 x 9.2 mm
Weight(grams)	129 g
Sound
Media Player	Music formats: MP3/WAV/eAAC+ - Video formats: MP4/H.264/H.263
Alert Tone	Vibration, MP3
Speakerphone	Yes
Battery
Type	Li-Ion
Capacity(mAh)	1520 mAh
Talk Time with Standard Battery (Minutes)	WCDMA: Up to 510 / GSM: Up to 650
Standby Time with Standard Battery (Hours)	WCDMA: Up to 440 / GSM: Up to 373
After Sales Service
Warranty Period	1 Year