Yesterday we covered the news that ASUS had announced the new PadFone Mini, and being as these kinds of devices are fairly popular, we thought it best to take a bit more of a closer look. Unfortunately, as we’re not at CES ourselves, we’ve got to rely on other sources of information.
This morning, in our news feed, we saw the excellent hands on prepared by the good folk at Android Police, and we couldn’t help but share some of this with you. Credit where credit is due, though, the hands-on video and imagery are entirely theirs, and are shown here for your convenience. For more detail, of course, you can visit their story.
To recap, the PadFone Mini is an entry-level device; it features a 4″ handset with 480×800 display which docks into a 7″ tablet enclosure, which itself offers a 1280×800 display. The devices are powered by an Intel Z2560 Atom processor, with 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage. At launch, the PadFone Mini will be an Android 4.3 Jelly Bean flavour, with an upgrade to KitKat not far behind it.
Firstly, a hands-on video so you can see exactly what the PadFone Mini looks like and how it works:
For the asking price of $249 USD, picking up a tablet and a phone isn’t too bad, and while the specs of each wouldn’t knock your socks off, it’s not often (if at all) that you’ll be able to pick up two devices for the price of less than one otherwise.
As you can see, the process of mating the two devices together, and separating them, is a cinch, and the skin that ASUS have added to the default Android layout, called Zen UI, appears to be rather well done, responding quickly and fluidly to user interactions.
We’d love to get our hands on one of these so we can look into it a bit further for you in the form of a review, which we’ll be chasing up as soon as we can!
