Asus has officially unveiled its smartphone-in-a-tablet, the PadFone 2 at an event in Taiwan. Just as the recent leaks have shown, the Asus PadFone 2 comes with various upgrades over the original PadFone.
The PadFone 2 smartphone features a 4.7-inch 720p Super IPS panel, a Qualcomm quad-core processor, a 13MP BSI Sony camera sensor, as well as a 1.2MP front camera. The camera is capable of recording 720p HD video at 60fps, and 1080p HD video at 30fps. It can also take up to 100 continuous full-resolution photos.
The device runs on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but Asus has promised a Jelly Bean upgrade soon.
Other notable features of the PadFone 2 include 2GB of RAM, a 2,140mAh (fixed) battery, NFC and 50GB of Asus cloud storage. There’s no support for microSD. For connectivity, the PadFone 2 features WCDMA 900/2,100MHz radios, and LTE 800/1,800/2,600MHz radios in the global model.
The tablet dock of the PadFone, or PadFone station has a 10.1-inch IPS display with a 1,280 x 800 pixel resolution. It is powered by a 5,000 mAh battery, and weighs in at just 514 grams. With the smartphone attached, the weight is about 649 grams, which is still more than 200 grams lighter than the original PadFone.
The PadFone 2 without the PadFone Station – the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB variants – are priced between $620 to $750, while the phone-in-tablet combo costs an additional US$210 to each version.
Asus recently launched the PadFone in India priced at Rs. 64,999. The PadFone is powered by dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor and has a 1GB RAM, 32GB of internal storage and an 8-MP digital camera with Fuji image processor, F2.2 aperture and 5-element lens.
The PadFone 2 will be launched before the end of December in Europe (Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden) and Asia (Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, U.A.E).
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