The Asus Fonepad is a smartphone with a 7 inch screen. Or maybe it’s a 7 inch tablet which makes phone calls.
Either way, when Asus introduced the Fonepad a few months ago, the company promised a device with a 1.2 GHz Intel Atom Z2420 processor and 16GB of storage.
Now there’s a new model available, featuring a faster 1.6 GHz Atom Z2640 CPU and 32GB of storage.
The rest of the specs remain unchanged. Both models have 7 inch, 1280 x 800 pixel IPS displays, microSD card slots for extra storage, built-in WiFi, GPS, and HSPA+ connectivity, and cameras on the front and back of the tablet.
Asus still has no plans to offer either model in the US, but Engadget reports that in Taiwan the new model sells for about $360 while the original Fonepad with 16GB sells for $300.
This looks like a decent tablet, perhaps even better than Nexus 7 for the money, but where it could lag behind is that its not ARM CPU, thus there might be some slight delay when opening apps and working on it, yes?
No. The Intel atom processor is faster in some tasks. The biggest concern is app compatibility. Some apps just won’t work or performance will be compromised.
Wasnt there a problem given that Androind is built for ARM and you need ARM-to-X86 layer to make it work on Atom CPU’s, thus causing slight delays during certain tasks or with certain software?
Is it possible to put Ubuntu on that machine?
Not presently… Wait for the Bay Trail ATOM to come out for better Linux support, not to mention much better performance…
could you use this on a hspa network on this side of the pond if you could order one from over there?
Yes. It supports at&t 3G. The missing (1700) band would get true dc hspa+ with 42mbits on T-Mobile. T-Mobile is starting to deploy dc hspa+ on 1900 in some markets.
Either way you’ll get 5Mbits/s average on at&t
my hopes have been risen and dashed in the same article no pentaband fonepad yet?