Asus PadFone Review

Introduction:

The Asus PadFone is a pretty unique device – it's a combination of a phone and a tablet chassis, powered by that phone. The idea is that you already have huge processing power in your handset, so why need to buy another device with similar specs when you can use the phone's hardware and only get a bigger screen? This should also translate into saving a few dollars since you don't have to pay twice for things such as the processor.

As good as the idea sounds on paper, though, the PadFone is the first gadget of this kind, so the big question is whether Asus managed to wrap an interesting idea into a similarly well finished product? The answer is not that clear – with tablets slimming down in both bulk and price, the PadFone has to answer to some serious engineering challenges to succeed.

Design:

First, the Asus PadFone itself. It surprises with very elegant, sleek forms, finished in Asus's zenbook design language. That means a very eye-catchy rippled back plastic cover that is also very grippy and practical, and also pleasant to touch.



You can compare the Asus PadFone with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

On the sides, a matte aluminum frame in a teardrop shape encircles the device and holds its volume up and down buttons, as well as the lock key. Those keys are also aluminum with just the right amount of travel – you don't need to press too hard or light, the engineering of the phone itself is excellent.

The Asus PadFone also feels very light at 4.6 ounces, and relatively thin at 0.4 inches (9.4mm). We should also note that it uses the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on-screen buttons, so the front is completely clean of physical or capacitive keys.

We also appreciate Asus' decision to include separate micro-HDMI and micro-USB ports on the left. Having a micro-HDMI port makes it extremely easy to hook up the phone to an HD TV, and cables are easy to find.



Display:

The 4.3-inch 540x960-pixel Super AMOLED screen might not be up to the size game as most high-end Android devices nowadays rely on bigger screens. We wouldn't necessarily hold this against it, but we should caution you that those on-screen buttons take up a noticeable chunk of those 4.3 inches, so you're left with even less space after all.

When it comes to the details, Super AMOLED means a PenTile screen and this in turn translates into less subpixels, and the qHD resolution while not bad certainly seems a bit behind the times. If we don't pick the nits too much though, you'd be happy with the vibrant colors and deep blacks on the display. Asus has handily included an “outdoor mode” that boosts the screen brightness, and makes it much easier to use the screen outdoors even on a sunny day.

PadFone Station and Docking:

Now, the PadFone is a good phone on its own, but its the PadFone Station, that 10.1-inch tablet chassis that it plugs into, that is its true raison d'etre. And here is when things start to get complicated.

First, we should one again say that the PadFone Station doesn't work on its own, you need to have the phone tucked inside it and the phone is what powers that big tablet screen.

And second, while the phone itself is sleek, the PadFone Station is disappointingly bulky. As in huge by today's standards - it's thick, big and heavy, nothing even close to devices beautifully thin devices like say the Apple iPad or Asus' own Transformer Pad. We really want to like the tablet, but right from the get go that huge bulky slate is one big turnoff. It's also impractical - it's too heavy for you to hold to read a book or watch movies.

If for some reason you don't care about the big size all that much though, it seems that Asus did a good job on most other things. To plug in the phone there is a latch mechanism on the back of the PadFone Station. The latch opens 90 degrees when you drag the slider on the top of the device. Easy and quick. Tucking in the device is also a breeze, but getting it out definitely takes a lot of getting used to. It's so securely and snuggle in there you'd have to put in quite a lot of effort to get it out.



Once the phone snaps in its place in the PadFone Station, almost instantly with very, very little delay, the tablet screen lights up with an almost complete mirror of what's on the phone.

The PadFone Station features a 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800-pixel IPS display. The screen is LCD, unlike the AMOLED one on the phone, but that's no huge surprise as the price for AMOLED panel still seems too comparatively high for big displays. Again, for outdoor performance, we recommend you enable the “outdoor mode” in Settings – brightness gets a much needed boost for the sunny outdoors.



In terms of the looks, you'd see two fake speaker-like grills that serve only as a design element. The tablet also has its own 1.3-megapixel front camera that will come in handy for video calls. For rear shooting, it uses the camera on the phone which peeks in through a hole purposefully drilled on the back of the chassis.

Buttons on the tablet, just like on the phone, are conveniently placed, easy to press and give a nice feel. The PadFone Station charges through a proprietary port and has a 6,600mAh battery of its own.



Asus is also including a dual-GPS antenna which locks your exact position quicker on the Station and a dedicated 3G antenna so that the phone stays connected even when docked. On the back, there is a single, pretty loud speaker.



PadFone Station and Apps:

One of the best features about having the PadFone with the Station add-on is called Dynamic Switching. Basically, this means that you can start doing something on your phone - say, start watching a movie, - but then decide you'd better see it on the 10.1-inch screen. You'd just plug the phone in and the PadFone Station will open from the exact place you left off. Or you could start typing an email on the phone, and decide to continue on the tablet - you just plug the phone into the chassis and dynamically switch. Or open a webpage.



The idea is great, but in reality Asus is only supporting native applications like the Android Browser, Dialer, Contacts and default email client. Some of the most popular apps like YouTube and Gmail are not supported. Games wouldn't dynamically switch either.

Also, the tablet and the phone don't share the same wallpaper, because of the difference in resolution, but that's something we can live with easily.



Pen Bluetooth accessory:

Asus bundles the tablet with a Pen Bluetooth stylus that doubles as a microphone/earpiece. The idea is that when you plug in the phone, someone might call you. Taking the PadFone out only to take the call isn't always quick and convenient enough, so that's when the Pen accessory comes into play. It has an earpiece and a microphone, and you can easily pick up a call with a dedicated button, but we wouldn't want to be in your position when people see you talking to a pen.

Jokes aside, what really bothered us here is that the microphone on the Pen stylus is horrific. It catches a lot of outside noise and not only that but voices sound distorted and hissy. The earpiece is a bit too quiet also.



As purely a stylus, though, the PadFone Pen is a great tool. It's beautifully designed with some thickness to it that actually makes the grip more comfortable. The Pen has a nice soft tip that gives an instant feedback as to how hard you push, and that's great. Finally, to charge it, you just lift up the lid that protects its standard microUSB port. Unfortunately, it cannot be docked in the tablet, so you have to carry it separately.

Interface and Functionality:

The PadFone ships with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich with a very light Asus skin on top of it. We love vanilla Android for both its performance and looks, but this here overlay is one of the best we've seen and we didn't mind it all – actually, we liked the brilliantly designed simplistic widgets, the brightness controls integrated right in the notification shade and a couple of nice little additions.

The brilliant work on the skin is probably a huge factor in having Android virtually flow very smoothly. The weather and battery widgets as we said integrate so well with the experience, they are a joy, and while you can disable the Asus-ified notification dropdown, you probably wouldn't want to as that's where you have essential controls like the Outdoor mode toggle (pushes the phone brightness for the outdoors). Go into the dialer, and you'd have smart dialling, a simple time-saver that you'd come to love.



For those who have used an Asus device before, the list of included apps will be familiar. For others – it'd seem too much. You have the App Locker, WebStorage, SplashTop Remote (under MyCloud), asus@vibe, MyNet (for DLNA sharing), File Manager, SuperNote, Polaris Office and Garmin StreetPilot. Those apps range from cloud storage to entertainment, productivity and navigation, so we'd definitely take a closer look at some of them.



Processor and Memory:

The Asus PadFone comes with a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8260A clocked at 1.5GHz, which is excellent and matches current quad-core devices in performance. The phone also has 1GB of RAM and Adreno 225 graphics.

This combination makes for a blazing fast, almost lag-free experience both on the PadFone and in the PadFone Station. We’ve run a few tests to help you get a better grasp of the processing power of the S4 chip powering the device.

	Quadrant Standard	AnTuTu	NenaMark 2
Asus PadFone	5017	6327	60,6
Samsung Galaxy S III	5335	12016	58,6
HTC One X	4848	11024	47,4
Samsung Galaxy Nexus	2000	5503	24

The Quadrant score of above 5,000 places the PadFone in the top tier of Android devices, but the Adreno 225 graphical card is more of a mid-range affair scoring well but not great in graphical benchmarks.

When it comes to built-in memory, there are different versions of the PadFone. We had the 16GB one, with nearly 13 gigs of storage available, and there’s also a 32GB version. In either case, the memory is expandable by as much as 32GB more via a microSD card slot.

Internet and Connectivity:

The PadFone runs on Ice Cream Sandwich and nowadays this is a minimum requirement. The Internet browsing experience is a glaring example why you need Android 4.0. Chrome, the browser that Google is using as default in its latest devices, require ICS to run, and on this here device it runs perfectly smoothly, with no trouble zooming in and out, and scrolling around.



You can connect to the web via either HSPA or Wi-Fi, but the HSPA bands it supports are not compatible with US carriers, so you'd have to rely on the slower 2G speeds or your Wi-Fi network. There is also no 4G LTE version at the moment.

Camera:

On the back of the beautiful rippled plastic cover, there is an 8-megapixel f/2.2 auto-focus camera with LED flash. It takes good stills in general and outstanding macro, with shallow depth. The camera does a solid job overall, with accurate color reproduction and good dynamic range in pictures, but taking images is slow – there is none of that zero shutter lag you might have heard about in other phones recently.

The camera interface is an Asus creation, with some great visual improvements showing you how some filters work before applying them. What we don't like about it is that it strips some of the options off the stock ICS camera interface. The HDR, image stabilizer, slow motion, smile and burst shot options are nowhere to be found.



For video conferencing, there is a VGA front-facing camera on the phone, and a 1.3-megapixel shooter on the tablet chassis.

For video recording, the 8-megapixel camera takes 1080p videos at 30 frames per second that look gorgeous and are rich in details. We're happy with the performance, but if we had to pick the nits we'd say we miss the tap to focus option.

Asus PadFone Sample Video:



Asus PadFone Indoor Sample Video:



Multimedia:

Interestingly, the Asus PadFone doesn't support DivX-encoded movies, so you'd need to rely on third-party apps. Usually, we wouldn't even bother mentioning that - it's common sense, you download the app and you're good to go. In this case, though, no DivX support in the default media player means that you cannot use Dynamic Switching for DivX movies with the PadFone Station as Dynamic Switching isn't working for third-party apps. That's a bit of a bummer.

Performance:

We’ve already mentioned that there are a couple of ways to make a phone call on the PadFone. First, the usual - you can speak on the phone. Microphone quality is okay, a bit digitized, but with otherwise strong volume, and the earpiece sounds clear.

Next when the PadFone is docked into the Station you can use the speakerphone of the tablet. Again, the quality is good when you’re close to it.

Finally, if you don’t want everyone listening to your conversations, there’s the pen accessory. With just a press of the button you change the output from the speakerphone to the pen. Again, the issues there are mostly with the microphone on the pen, which sounds terrible.

Our few days with the Asus PadFone showed that it successfully took us through the day with its 1,520mAh removable battery.

The PadFone Station battery life is quoted at the solid 10 hours.

Conclusion:

The Asus PadFone is the first attempt to bring to life an exciting idea. The idea of having just one device powering your computing needs. And we love that notion. Despite what Asus achieved with the PadFone, this attempt alone is worth applause - it creates a category of its own.

But with this in mind, we should note that the PadFone is not a concept - it is an absolutely real device now, sold for real money. And while we expected the PadFone approach to bring the price of a device like the Station and the whole combination down a lot, it costs a lot of money. Right now, you can buy the PadFone with Station for $840. In Europe, the PadFone alone costs around 600 euro and the Station can be purchased for 150 euro.

And that seems overpriced, and this inadequate pricing brings our overall score down. It’s not just the cost, though - competing devices like the iPad and Galaxy Tab 10.1 all offer much slimmer, sleeker, better designs, and the PadFone Station is just too bulky, as if it was from the distant past.

The phone is brilliantly designed, but hardware-wise neither the screen, nor the processor really justify its high price. If you want to experiment with the PadFone, you’d definitely have fun, but right now it seems that it makes sense to get a separate phone and a tablet, at least until a future generation PadFone arrives – hopefully thinner and cheaper.

Asus PadFone Video Review: