The PadFone is a great idea and features a fantastic battery life when combined with its accessories. However, while the concept is cool, we think users may find the entire combination bulky.
| The good | Extremely snappy performance; fantastic battery life (with the PadFone Station and PadFone Station Dock); sleek handset design. |
|---|---|
| The bad | Bulky; connecting and disconnecting the PadFone can be a chore; the large touchpad may interfere with your typing. |
Announced last year at the Computex show in Taiwan, the prototype version of the Asus PadFone seemed like a logical progression of the Motorola Atrix Lapdock design. So while it is not the first hybrid device on the market, it's likely the first to run Android 4.0. We also found the idea of transforming a phone into a tablet quite intriguing.
Prototype devices sometimes don't make the cut and get killed--Microsoft's Courier is a prime example of this. Luckily, Asus seems to have pushed ahead with the PadFone concept. The result is a handset that not only turns into a tablet, but morphs into a laptop, too.
While the PadFone is primarily a smartphone, we'll be reviewing it together with the PadFone Station (the tablet attachment) and PadFone Station Dock (the keyboard). So instead of just a phone review, you're also getting one for a tablet.
Update (May 23 2100): Asus has released a firmware which fixes the WhatsApp bug mentioned below. The update lets you manually set whether apps stay opened when it switches to tablet mode.
Design
The PadFone itself is sleek and well-built. We especially like the feel of the textured back, which gives the handset a good grip. The PadFone is in no danger of accidentally slipping out of our palms.
(Credit: Aloysius Low/CNET Asia)
Volume controls are located on the right side, while a 3.5mm headphone jack sits right in the middle at the top, with a power button next to it. A micro-HDMI and a micro-USB port is located on the left, and these are used to connect the handset to the PadFone Station. The rear cover is removable, and beneath it, you'll see the 1,520mAh battery.
Asus has mostly left the Android 4.0 operating system as close to stock as possible. Asus has made some minor tweaks to get it to work as a tablet but these aren't visible. So if you are looking for a handset that's as close to stock Ice Cream Sandwich as possible, here's something to consider.
The entire front is clad in Corning Gorilla Glass, which gives it a very nice modern look that you'll find similar to an Apple product. Since the PadFone uses software buttons, Asus has chosen to put its logo below the display. We would have been happier if the logo was located at the back instead for a cleaner look. The PadFone is lightweight at just 129g and we think this is due to the plastic material used.
Asus' handset features a qHD (960 x 540 pixels) 4.3-inch Super AMOLED display. Colors are vibrant and visible in bright sunlight. As mentioned earlier, the handset uses software buttons, and we personally prefer this option to physical buttons. In tablet mode, the PadFone features a WXGA (1280 x 800 pixels) resolution.
The PadFone Station and PadFone Station dock looks a lot like the Asus range of Transformer tablets. However, Asus has taken the strange step of making the docks proprietary--you won't be able to connect a dock made for one Transformer tablet to another model. Asus needs to promote interoperability between its products. The lack of cross-compatibility is quite the downer, especially if you already own other Asus products and are looking to get the PadFone to enhance your user experience.
(Credit: Aloysius Low/CNET Asia)
Now, the PadFone Station is by no means thin or light--it weighs 724g alone--but combined with the 129g of the PadFone, you're easily lifting 853g every time you want to read a book or surfing the Web with the tablet. Our arms got quite tired after a while, so this isn't an ideal solution if you want to use the PadFone in tablet mode for long periods.
Combine the tablet with the 646g PadFone Station Dock and you'll find that you are actually lugging around a 1.5kg notebook that lacks the processing power of a regular laptop. While it's not really ideal--a netbook and a smartphone may weigh less and be more practical--it's good to know that if you need to type with physical keys, the option is there.
We found the keyboard to be useful, but typing on it was far from comfortable or usable. Since the dock has a limited axis of movement, you won't be able to titl the screen backwards for very much. The furthest you can go is about 100 degrees at the most, which, depending on your sitting position, may not provide the best user experience. Furthermore, our hands kept brushing against the touchpad, which caused plenty of typing errors as the cursor would jump all over the place. However, you can disable the touchpad if you know you'll be doing some heavy typing.
Features
As you know by now, the PadFone can dock with the PadFone Station to turn into a tablet, and you can take things even further by connecting the tablet into the PadFone Station Dock to turn it into a laptop. The Motorola Atrix works in a similar fashion. Unlike the Atrix which has a customized Webtop OS, the PadFone relies on Ice Cream Sandwich's flexibility to do the tablet transforming trick.
When used on its own, the PadFone is a phone, but when plugged into the PadFone Station, the OS switches to the tablet version. Sliding the PadFone into the PadFone Station tablet was a simple affair, just aim the phone toward the connectors and push down till you hear a click. Because the PadFone Station has no rear camera, the phone's 8-megapixel camera does double duty, as you can see from our picture below. In case you're wondering, Asus would not comment on whether future Asus handsets would be able to connect with the PadFone Station.
(Credit: Aloysius Low/CNET Asia)
Besides the 8-megapixel shooter, the PadFone has a front-facing VGA camera that is disabled when connected to the PadFone Station which has its own a 1.3-megapixel camera in front.
When plugged in, the phone OS automatically switches to tablet mode and the process is mostly seamless--default apps seem to support dynamic switching which means you can continue using them in tablet mode. If the app is not supported, then an error message will pop up stating that the app in question has been closed. You'll have to relaunch it again. This happens when you connect or disconnect the PadFone from the PadFone Station.
Strangely enough, we noticed that when you dock the PadFone, it seems to shut down some running services, including messaging apps like WhatsApp. This means that you will not receive any push messages until you turn on the app again. This can be quite annoying, because as mentioned, this will happen every time the PadFone connects or disconnects with the dock. Another bug we observed is that when the SMS app is in the foreground when in tablet mode, with the screen turned off, you won't be able to hear SMS notifications. These are possible dealbreakers for those who place great importance on receiving messages in a timely fashion. We have contacted Asus about these issues and are awaiting their response.
You can also make and answer calls while the PadFone is plugged in, but you're advised to use a Bluetooth headset if you want to avoid looking really silly. That or you can quickly plug out the handset by opening the latch and pushing down to release the phone to answer your call. Asus has a Stylus Headset that works, as the name suggests, both as a stylus and a headset. However, this was not available in time for our review.
Both the PadFone Station and the PadFone Station Dock have built-in batteries, allowing you to charge your handset while away from a power plug. The PadFone Station and PadFone Station Dock feature a 6,600mAh battery. In our review period, we found this to be very useful, as the PadFone Station would charge the phone, while the PadFone Station Dock would charge the tablet. We do note that charging the phone from the PadFone Station was slow--we only got back about 30 percent of charge after four hours.
The only thing we didn't quite like about the concept was the need to constantly connect and disconnect the PadFone. Depending on your usage patterns, you may be content with leaving the handset inside the PadFone Station, but we preferred holding the lightweight PadFone when we didn't really need a tablet.
We did encounter some issues with the PadFone Station, too--sometimes the PadFone would "lose" its connection with the tablet dock, and a shrill beeping would occur until you ejected the PadFone. This happened infrequently, and we were unable to deliberately trigger the issue.
The PadFone's camera has an 8-megapixel backside-illuminated (BSI) sensor, F2.2 aperture and a 5-element lens. On paper, this sounds like a winning combination but we found actual usage to be lackluster. The electronic shutter was slow and pictures taken often differed from what was displayed onscreen at the time of capture. White balance wasn't perfect either , with the phone being unable to adjust to incandescent lighting. We still got yellowish photos of a white plate after manually choosing the "incandescent" setting. Images also appeared to be very noisy and lacked detail.
The Asus PadFone comes with all the connectivity options that you'll find on a high-end device. The handset packs HSPA+, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, GPS and A-GPS. On top of the micro-SD card slot on the PadFone which allows for up to 32GB more storage, the PadFone Station Dock adds two USB ports and an MMC, SDHC card reader. Asus has also included a free 32GB cloud storage service for three years called Asus Webstorage.
Performance
The dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 8260A (Cortex A15) processor made using the handset smooth and silky. Even in tablet mode, you'll find no issues with the performance of the phone's hardware.
Since the PadFone is supposed to be just one part of the entire ecosystem, we decided our battery test would factor in the PadFone Station and PadFone Station Dock too. The result? We went a whole weekend without needing to charge the handset, though by Sunday evening, the PadFone Station Dock was dry and our PadFone Station was almost empty. On its own, the PadFone will lasted us a day. This test was done with our usual battery test settings of having two Gmail accounts, as well as Facebook and Twitter, on push.
There were no issues with voice quality and call reception, but the external speaker volume could be louder. We even changed the ringtone to one of a higher pitch and could barely hear it in noisy places.
Conclusion
The Asus PadFone is a great concept that has made it to retail, but it still has some kinks to work out. Overall performance was great, especially battery life, but the handset was let down by a underperforming camera. The overall bulkiness of the PadFone Station and Dock also made those accessories quite inconvenient to carry with you. So while the PadFone is meant to help you reduce the number of gadgets you lug around, it ends up taking up some space in your bag.
Asus has not revealed the pricing for the PadFone or how it will be bundled, but the company did tell us that it would be made available sometime next month. We note that the Samsung Galaxy announcement will be happening in the same month. Samsung had earlier made statements that the company would only announce the handset when it's closer to the launch date, so it looks like the Asus PadFone may face some stiff competition when it hits retail.
