The Asus Padfone seemed like one of the best ideas man had ever come up with, along with sliced bread and pork scratchings. The Padfone seemed to be the answer to a lot of peoples problems. A tablet, powered by a smartphone.
What became of it? Well no networks took it on and barely any retailers bothered stocking it due to high prices and stock delays.
This morning Asus have announced the new Padfone, the Padfone 2. It’s a phone, a tablet, an ultrabook and a battery packed power house.
Specs for the Padfone 2 are as follows:
- 10.1” 1280x720p display
- CPU – 1.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 processor
- 2GB of RAM
- 13MP Camera
- Android 4.0.4 updated to Jelly Bean later on
- Phone battery 2140 mAh and tablet battery 5000 mAh
The Padfone will be released before the end of 2012 in Europe and Asia costing around $650 for the phone, and the tablet will be a further $200
Here are some images of the Padfone 2:
I do like the look of this, but another Ice Cream Sandwich tablet at over £500 is probably not going be a massive success. Especially in comparison to the new iPad, the mini iPad, the Amazon Kindle Fire HD and the Google/Asus Nexus 7. Oh and let’s not forget the flood of Windows RT tablets.
Here are a few videos Asus have posted on YouTube as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjpACIJkpQo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjaZRKdyl4s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04qO2XZ3UMc
I think this is a great concept and if they can get the pricing right i would be extremely interested but based on the quoted prices this would need to come down a bit.
If you could get this free (tablet included)on a £35 – £40pm 2 year contract then I think it would sell quite well. If however you have to pay £40pm for the phone and £200 on top, then nah, it’ll be consigned to the also-rans 🙁
So they want me to pay $200 for the tablet part, does it run without the phone in it?
Like has been mentioned, if they can get a operator to pick it up, £30-40/pm with the tablet section chucked in, they might have some success.
I can get the Galaxy Nexus for $349 and the Nexus 7 for $199 direct from Google = $548 vs ~$800 ?
It doesn’t run without the phone part plugged in
$200 for a monitor then? I can see it is a good idea but not for me.
I said this with the Padfone 1, and I’ll say it again, they’ve missed a trick. They should have put a dock connector on the bottom and made it fit the Transformer keyboards, then you’d have a TransformerPadFone
You could use it with the dock on the padfone 1.
They must have heard me!