Berlin (dpa) – A tablet or a telephone, that’s the question.
Asus has presented a small Android tablet with telephone functions called the Fonepad, while, at the same time, trotting out a new smartphone-tablet combo called the Padfone.
The Fonepad comes with an Atom dual-core processor (1.2 gigahertz) and a 7-inch HD display. Its camera only has a resolution of 3 megapixels and isn’t available at all in the 16-gigabyte (GB) version, which will go on sale in April, in either gold or gray, for 219 euros (286 dollars).
Asus’ new Padfone is called Infinity. It’s a smartphone that can be inserted into an accompanying tablet station, which is basically a display with a battery. The 5-inch smartphone with full HD resolution and pixel density of 441 pixels per inch comes in a seamless housing of brushed aluminium.
Inside, there’s a 600 quad-core Snapdragon CPU (1.7 gigahertz) from Qualcomm. It comes with 2 GB of working memory and 64 GB of storage.
The low aperture 13-megapixel camera (f 2.0) can take up to eight pictures a second and, in video mode, 1,080p images (1,920 X 1,080 pixels) with 30 pictures a second. There’s also an NFC antennae in the Padfone logo.
The tablet station contains a 10.1-inch Full HD display with a 5,000-milliampere strong battery and a 1.8-centimetre loudspeaker on the back. The Asus Echo application helps with voice commands while another one called Textnote is supposed to convert handwriting into text.
Dynamic Display is the name of the function that allows the device to switch between smartphone and tablet as it is docked and redocked.
The Padfone and station are set to hit the market in April for 999 euros.
There’s also Asus Open Cloud (AO Cloud), which will provide new online aids like computer repairs or optimization (AO Help). There will also be a service called AO Link to automatically move data between devices, as well as a service, AO Stream, for synchronizing and streaming videos, music, pictures and documents.
AO Cloud also lets users regulate online storage services from other providers.
