The Asus PadFone is a 4.3 inch smartphone which you can use on its own — or as the brains of a 10 inch tablet when you want a larger screen and extra battery life. The idea is that you don’t have to keep data on your phone and tablet synchronized when your phone is your tablet.

Asus has been showing off the PadFone concept since last summer — but now the company says it’s almost ready to roll. The Asus PadFone and PadFone Station Dock should start shipping in April.

The PadFone itself features a 4.3 inch, 960 x 540 pixel Super AMOLED display with Corning Gorilla Glass. It has a 1.5 GHz Snapdragon S4 processor with Adreno 225 graphics and runs Google Android 4.0 software.

Asus will offer the PadFone with 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of storage. All versions will have 1 GB of RAM, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and a 1520mAh battery. There’s also a microSD card slot for extra storage.

The phone has an 8MP rear camera with auto-focus, an LED flash, and F/2.2 aperture as well as a front-facing VGA camera.

The PadFone can handle WCDMA and HSPA+ wireless connections. It measures 5″ x 2.6″ x 0.36″ and weighs 4.5 ounces.

The Asus PadFone Station doesn’t have its own processor, memory or storage, since it’s basically an extension of the phone. But here’s what it does feature:

  • 10.1 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel capacitive multitouch Corning Gorilla Glass screen
  • Space in the rear to use the PadFone rear camera
  • Front-facing 1.3Mp camera
  • 24.4 Whr battery
  • Phone and GPS antennas
  • Speakers
  • Vibration sensors
  • microUSB and micro HDMI ports

You can dock the phone in the tablet by lifting a door in the back of the docking station and locking the phone into place.

The PadFone Station measures 10.7″ x 7″ x 0.53″ and weighs 1.6 pounds.

You can also get an optional stylus for writing or drawing, and an optional keyboard dock that allows you to use the tablet like a laptop. In other words, you can dock the phone in a tablet station and then dock that into a keyboard.

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5 replies on “Asus PadFone combines smartphone, tablet: coming in April”

  1.  https://www.asus.com/Mobile/PadFone/#specifications

    In the specs they mention weight “with battery”.  So unless that’s mis-worded then it probably means a replaceable battery like other Smart Phones.

    If you look at the photo of the back, the bottom edge looks like it has the standard slit space for leveraging the back cover off.

    Also both the tablet and keyboard docks have batteries too, though those two are probably not replaceable, but adds 5x and 9x respectively to the run time according to Asus and that also means keeping the Phone charged while docked.

    1. Thanks for the info.
      My issue with a non replaceable battery is not so much fear of not getting through the day with heavy use, but extending the life of the gadget as a whole.

      As i’ve stated before i still use the T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone from end 2008. Thanks to the custom ROM community it got every update up until Android 2.3.7 (something not even the Galaxy S2 has yet officially) even though official HTC Roms ended with 1.6 because “the phone was to weak and had to little memory to support 2.0 onwards”.

      Android 4.0 though just assumes phones have a GPU that can be used for hardware acceleration and more than 192 MB Ram in total, both of which the G1 simple can’t deliver.

      So the reasion i want a user replaceable battery on my next Smartphone is, that i know that the battery will run flat at least twice before i have the need to replace it and just going on ebay or amazon and paying 15-20 bucks a pop for a replacement battery is way more conveniant than having to send my phone to the manufacturer for weeks on end and paying what an unsubsedised entry level phone would cost, just so it can hold a charge again.

        1. thx again, but i’m pretty sure already i’ll be getting the padphone, it has everything i want from my next device:

          – 4.3″ Screen (i’d prefer 3.7-4.0 but will not buy anything above 4.3)
          – onscreen controls (hate capacitive, either onscreen or clicky buttons)
          – Dual Core
          – 1 GB of Ram
          – SD-Card slot
          – replaceable battery

          anything besides that is a nice bonus 😉

  2. PLEASE tell me the Phone Part has a removable battery.
    If so this will officially be the replacement for my trusty old T-Mobile G1.The specs of the phone read very close to the HTC One S, but HTC deeply disapointed me with the non-replaceable battery.Also onscreen android controls > capacitive buttons & the fact that it both has massive internal storage and an SD-Card slot is also a plus that HTC doesn’t bring to the table.

    The “make my phone the brains of a Transformer productivity Smartbook” is just icing on the cake.

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