Today, I laid my hands on the ASUS Padfone 2. For those of you who don’t know, ASUS is the world top-three consumer notebook vendor and maker of the world’s best-selling and most award-winning motherboards. The company’s well known for its innovations that set trends, creates new product categories and transform users’ expectations. And in my opinion, that’s exactly what they did again with the Padfone 2.
The Padfone 2 is a literal and great combination of a tablet and a smartphone. The Padfone 2 is the smartphone. The tablet is called Padfone 2 Station. Unlike the traditional smartphone and tablet, the Padfone 2 has Dynamic Display -an unique technology developed by ASUS –which automatically re-size or re-layout the application user interface to fit the screen size, hence encouraging users to use the phone or the tablet at any time and any place, effortlessly. Dynamic Display is ASUS unique technique which automatically re-size or re-layout the application user interface to fit the screen size when you go from smartphone to tablet and vice-versa.
ASUS Padfone 2
Take your smartphone with its little 4.7inches screen, dock it into a 10 inches tablet and it comes to full live: you know hold in your hand a 10 inches tablet. The station doesn’t work unless the Padfone is plugged into it but it also serves a power bank for you to recharge your smartphone battery whenever there is no power source around. The Padfone 2 runs an Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and is powered by a quad-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor backed by a full 2GB RAM. Its performance remains the same whether the phone is on its own or plugged into the station.
It has a 4.7inches screen with a 1280 by 720 HD resolution. The tablet in the other hand has 1280 by 800 screen resolution. As to the camera wise, the Padfone 2 comes with a 13MP rear shooter, coupled with a 1.2MP front-facer. For a company that is not specialized in making smartphones, that’s already pretty good. Quality of pictures is overall good, with good color balance, sharp edges and a good amount of detail. The Padfone 2 uses two different micro-USB connectors on the Padfone 2 and its station which mean you need to carry two cables. It would’ve been nice to have one standard that can be used interchangeably. Besides that, it doesn’t allow storage extension.
The Padfone 2 comes with a 32GB on board with no upgrade possibility via micro-SD for example. These two points are my only regrets about the Padfone 2, which regrets pale in comparison to the value that it brings on the table. Pricing is not yet available but market watchers say the device is priced between N85, 000 and N90, 000.
- Best bargain: The Padfone 2 gives you nothing less but two upper scale devices – tablet and smartphone – for the price of one. I can’t see a better way of solving my need to carry a trendy smartphone for communication and that of having a pad for reading, watching documentaries, movies and playing games. Well done ASUS.
- One single data plan: The single data plan solution for my smartphone and tablet makes so much economically sense. Two devices, one data plan. Why do I need a data plan for my tablet when my smartphone can, at any given time, “mutate” into a tablet? Only the operators won’t like this idea.
- Unprecedented battery life: 16 hours talk time – 36 hours talk time when docked in pad. The Padfone 2 Station, besides allowing you to display your smartphone in large, is a real, cool power bank. And that’s the best thing ever as you never run out of power during the day.
- Cool and trendy: The Padfone 2 is not only a cool and trendy device, it makes you look cool and trendy. Finally a device that adds value to whom I already am.
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