Review: Asus PadFone 2 phone-tablet combo I thought the first Asus PadFone was a jolly good idea the moment I clapped eyes on it. Sadly it never made it to these shores but the PadFone 2 has. In a nutshell, what we have here is an Android smartphone that can be docked into a dumb tablet giving you not only a choice of two screen sizes but also the convenience of one …
For this price you get an engineering and technological solution to a problem that does not exist and a flawed concept that is unlikely to appeal to anyone.
Go Asus.
Might be worth buying as a novelty purchase and may have an antique noveltyr value in a few hundred years on a show such as Bargain Hunt 2213.
The only thing that concerns me is that docking mechanism, Id much rather it sat mostly inside the actual tablet frame.but with just enough showing to easily pull it out, this could be easily achieved with a slight rubberised lip and wouldn't need to stick out the top in tablet mode. This would certainly help the longevity / robustness of such a device. As for a better screen on the tablet bit I am not worried about that, the charging modes are flexible and it looks like a nice phone. Win-Win
"When docked to the tablet it will only shoot 5.5Mp stills and 720p video but I can’t see people doing that very often"
WRONG! Turn the Padfone 2 on it's side and miraculously notice the camera offer 13MP again. That does mean you are holding it in portrait of course. I noticed this odd behaviour when taking photos at a conference and writing up my notes on the PF2.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but -
1) 312dpi is, what, 14ppi less than the iphone 5? Oh, THE HUMANITY! Those eyes of yours must be something else to be able to easily differentiate between 312 and 325 ppi.
2) Modified micro USB (which does work with micro USB, but with a caveat that the connection isn't brilliant if you move the device around) is a problem, but a completely different connection which requires you to buy an adapter to connect to micro USB (which doesn't work brilliantly if you need to move the device around) isn't?
Hmmm..
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You could buy the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 for close to the same price and the tablet experience & screen would be considerably better. You could also upgrade one or the other as you see fit, or only lose half your investment if one of them is lost, stolen or broken.
I suppose there are some advantages to having a dockable phone but they only become compelling if the dock costs less money than a standalone tablet or offers something tangible that can't be achieved some other way.
I've never had to sync content between my phone and tablet because stuff like contacts, email etc. is in the cloud in the first place. It syncs itself.
The main annoyance of 2 devices is that when updates appear in Google Play that I have to download them twice. Not enough reason to inextricably tie them together into one device for me when for the same price I could have two independent ones.
If it were cheaper, or the dock also threw in a keyboard (a la ASUS Transformer) then it might be more interesting and useful for times when someone wants to hammer out an email or something.
As far as having to carry both around, if you're using the "padfone" as a phone as per its design and carrying the "station" around with you as well in case you might use it, that's no different to carrying around a separate phone and tablet.
As far as syncing, that would depend on whether you wanted to perform the same tasks on both the phone and tablet, i.e. it's down to the individual.
...until I saw the price. This device can be used as a phone or a tablet, never both at the same time, so it offers less functionality than if you simply bought a phone and a tablet. This is especially true of the recently announced padfone infinity. That you can buy a Nexus 4 and a Nexus 10 and still have hundreds in change before hitting the price of the padfone infinity is a bit ridiculous.
If this was two thirds of the price of a separate phone+tablet combo it might be compelling, because that would justify the reduced functionality.
Not strictly true.
I understand from Asus that the 1080p Infinity model will be sold alongside the model reviewed here. Apparently the Infinity will cost £799 when it goes on sale. If that is true I'd still go for the standard version if it were my money. Screen resolution aide the two devices are technically very similar.
That there is no storage expansion
Seems an overly consumer hostile move that all tech companies seem happy to follow but I guess the masses don't seem to care - and yea, seems a shame they dropped the keyboard part of the build (offering more battery life, storage expansion etc).
Also, reading between the lines, you seem to rate the phone much higher than the tablet (plastic shell with noticeable join, not great battery, low res quickly smudged screen), and so you start to wonder at the price, especially If the phones only advantage over the Nexus4 is not overheating.
I read about that device a while ago when phones and tablet were a sensible size. It made sense back then.
But now phones have increased in size and tablets keep shrinking, what on earth is going on?
To use a car analogy it's like buying a smaller caravan and a larger car. Eventually you'll end up with a camper van which is a cumbersome compromise.
Somebody kind of did do this already, with the Motorola Atrix - OK, so it was before tablets became all the rage but the idea was similar. It failed, but the laptop part lives on as a way to make a Raspberry Pi laptop - now if you can get hold of the tablet part cheaply once the hype dies down, might be a nice way to make a touchscreen Pi.... hmmm....
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