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Asus promised to launch its Padfone smartphone/tablet hybrid in Taiwan this April with an international launch to follow. But April has come and gone and the Padfone isn’t on sale yet.

So what happened?

According to Asus Indonesia, a shortage of Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processors is holding things up.

The Padfone is basically an Android smartphone with some supercharged optional accessories. Slide the phone into a slot in the back of a 10 inch tablet dock and you can use it just like a tablet.

Attach that tablet to an optional keyboard and you can use the contraption like a laptop. Both the tablet and keyboard docks have their own batteries, which means you can get some crazy long battery life if you use all three together.

But the CPU, memory, storage, and operating system are all on the phone. That means you don’t have to synchronize your data between devices — because there’s only one device that matters here.

The Padfone has a 4.3 inch, 960 x 540 pixel Super AMOLE Ddisplay, 1GB of RAM and up to 64GB of storage. it has an 8MP rear camera and a VGA camera on the front.

It’s designed to use a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor… if Asus can ever get its hands on enough of the chips to release the Padfone.

Meanwhile, you can check out a video overview of the tablet below, courtesy of the Asus Tech in Style website.

via Eee PC.it