At the 2011 Computex expo in Taipei, hometown company Asus demonstrated a novel way to make a tablet and smartphone play nice together: Use the former as a docking station for the latter.
The Padfone docks a 4.3-inch smartfone inside a 10.1-inch tablet, providing seamless interaction with dynamic display switching — that is, should you start watching a video on your phone it will automatically pop up on the tablet once connected; if, say, a phone call interrupts said video, you could answer either with the phone itself, or through the tablet using a Bluetooth headset.
While the Padfone has both a tentative release date and price — Q4 2011; $800 to $1000 — full specs are not yet available. Here’s what’s known: single hard drive; shared SIM card; two batteries; Qualcomm processor; will run on Android’s next-gen Ice Cream Sandwich OS. Also, while the processing guts of the thing will be found in the belly of the phone, the tablet won’t be totally passive. It will offer both a battery boost for the smartphone and extra connectivity ports.
Read more about the Padfone at Gizmag.
