Asus has been showing off its PadFone concept for nearly a year, and now the company is finally ready to start taking orders.

The PadFone is an Android smartphone with a 4.3 inch display that you can slide into a 10 inch tablet dock when you want a larger screen and longer battery life. Asus will start selling the PadFone in Taiwan on April 20th, with pre-orders opening on April 6th.

Asus PadFone

The idea behind the PadFone is that instead of buying a separate phone and tablet and keeping your files, apps, and data synchronized across multiple devices, you can have all your data on one device — your phone. The tablet dock is really just a dock. The phone is the brains of the operation.

The phone has a 4.3 inch, 960 x 540 pixel Super AMOLED display, a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB to 64GB of storage, and Google Android 4.0 operating system. It also has an 8MP rear camera and a front-facing VGA camera.

It measures 5″ x 2.6″ x 0.36″ and weighs 4.5 ounces.

The PadFone Station tablet dock has a 10.1 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel display, a front-facing 1.3MP camera, micro USB and micro HDMI ports, and a 24.4 Whr battery. It measures 10.7″ x 7.” x 0.53″ and weighs 1.6 pounds.

You can use the tablet dock not only to run Android apps on a larger screen, but also to extend the battery life of the PadFone or just to charge the smartphone on the go.

If that’s not enough for you, you can also add an optional keyboard docking station, much like the one available for the Asus Transformer line of tablets. It also has a separate battery, which means that if you use the PadFone, tablet dock, and keyboard dock together, you’ll have three batteries worth of juice… and Asus says you could theoretically get up to 102 hours of talk time using both docks at once.

Engadget reports that the phone alone will run about $610, while the phone with a tablet dock is closer to $850. Throw in the keyboard dock and the total price climbs to $950.

Bear in mind, those are the Taiwanese prices, and they don’t include any subsidies for signing a cellphone contract. The PadFone will likely be cheaper if and when it goes on sale in the US.

via Netbook News

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2 replies on “Asus PadFone smartphone/tablet hybrid on sale in Taiwan this month”

  1. Yes, it is great b/c I live in Asia! And I’m picking up my PadFone order next Mon! Oh, and how “amazing” that the internet allows a Black guy living all the way in Asia to see how racist America still is…

    #1: Learn to spell at least you jack a%%! The word is spelled:
    R-E-N-E-G-E.
    But then we all know that your spelling is intentional and that you are just a dimwit racist trying to be inflammatory!
    #2: “Do not renig” actually means to NOT go back on one’s word. So with your “play” on words it means TO re-elect the “nig” . Thanks for supporting the cause! LOL!

    More Black power in 2012! Laughing at you all the way to the (absentee) voting booth in Nov! Ha ha ha!

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