ASUS PadFone fuses smartphone and tablet, new pics reveal

May 29, 2011 By Adam Rosenberg

A few teasing images surfaced last week offering glimpses of a new device from ASUS making its debut at Computex 2011, something called PadFone, as PocketNow discovered. Earlier today, the same site posted some more revealing pics of the mysterious device, and it definitely manages to live up to its name.

As you can see, the PadFone comes fully equipped with a secret compartment for the docking of your ASUS-branded Android phone. Nothing is known about how the two devices will pair, but a design like that offers a lot of possibilities. More info will be coming when Computex kicks off this Tuesday.

You can also see in the image below how the PadFone seems to follow the lead of ASUS’ recently released Pad Transformer. If the pictured keyboard docking station is anything like that Transformer’s, it includes a built-in trackpad and battery, as well as USB and SD card ports. Folding a smartphone into a tablet into a netbook seems almost too over the top to be true, the Swiss Army Knife of mobile devices… and yet that’s exactly what we appear to be looking at.

Showing 5 comments

JohnL at 10:50pm 30th May 2011 What a neat and practical concept? This makes sense as we have one core device that can be a phone, a tablet and a netbook.
horiah00 at 2:49pm 30th May 2011 This is actually the future of the Personal Computer. With quad-core processors available for smart phones just around the corner, a smartphone will soon have enough computing power to replace the current PC for most tasks and day to day use. Watch my words: in less than one year the PadFone will take the world by storm the way the netbook and the iPad did.
ron at 11:14pm 29th May 2011 A really interesting concept. Asus is leading the market. The Transformer is the best tablet available, and amazingly, at the lowest price.
pinkeee at 6:40pm 29th May 2011 That's the new one on top of the transformer tablet showing its the same thiness.
judah9010 at 4:59pm 29th May 2011 Honeycomb has Gingerbread embedded. You change the screen size setting on Honeycomb and ... BAM! Gingerbread, and the converse is true as well. For any of you that were wondering why this was programmed in, the answer is above. Android ICS not needed, maybe an upgrade down the road but not required to make this work.