Announced: The Asus Padfone Mobile Phone That Transforms into a Tablet PC

Here’s the cool-looking Asus Padfone announced by Asus. By itself it’s just an Android smartphone. However there’s something up its sleeve. It comes with a companion tablet display that allows the main smartphone to be docked right into the heart of the companion tablet, instantly transforming it into a tablet with a larger screen while retaining the ability to make and answer phone calls.

This allows the smartphone’s screen to be displayed on a much larger touchscreen display which basically turns it into a tablet. However the announcement only comes with a prototype of the device with nothing else other than its main features and usability specified.

Here’s a couple of promotional videos rounding up the Asus Padfone’s features and functions:

This is quite a revolutionary design for a smartphone/tablet device that allows the user to easily switch between two modes. However this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have rivals. For example, portable pico projectors and 3rd party A/V connectors can also do the job of enlarging the display of mobile devices.

In addition, having a Bluetooth headset to listen to phone calls in the tablet mode will mean yet another burden in terms of battery management as it will bring the total battery count to three, namely the batteries found in the smartphone, tablet display companion and Bluetooth headset respectively.

Hopefully by the time the Asus Padfone is launched, wireless charging will have already taken off and we’ll be able to see this form of battery charging being used in mainstream devices so we can have one device that can be easily charged without any charging cables. Then it will definitely make life much easier when we use such a smartphone/tablet hybrid device like this.

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