Our friends at engadget have some great video of Asus’s new “tablet”, the Padfone. Unlike the Xoom, which turns into a laptop/desktop, the Padfone is a phone that docs into a tablet.
This is the exact sort of gizmo that this site is built around. Cool concept, unique approach, and something I’d love to get my hands on. Doubly so if it turns out to be a Google “Ice Cream Sandwich” device. The tablet/phone interface switch is intriguing.
The question, of course, is if it will be intriguing enough to consumers to make any kind of dent in the clear market lead Apple and (to lesser extent) Samsung have.
They need to make this concept less proprietary.
Like, be able to dock an HTC phone in a Samsung tablet, etc. If you are locking people into particular brands (worse yet, particular models), it will be unlikely to catch on as quickly, if ever at all.
I must admit, however, I like the idea. I was considering a tablet with 3G so I could swap my service from my phone to the tablet and vice versa- but then my data, installed apps, themes, etc, wouldn’t be in sync. Annoying. Sometimes I just wish my phone could be “temporarily turned into a tablet” without giving anything up. That appears to be this- just wish it were more practical.
There was actually another device reported at Computex that did just what you’re talking about, Brian. The company is called ICE and it’s called the Trinity Tablet.
Frankly, the entire thing reminds me of IBM’s ‘metaPad’ concept.
It would be difficult to produce such a thing WITHOUT being proprietary to a certain brand or model, unfortunately. If mobile product venues were less worried about “identity”, “personality”, etc., then we might have been able to come to more formal consensus’ regarding industry-wide standards, like Micro/mini-USB power requirements. They got as far as the power requirements, because no one wanted to agree on a freakin’ PLUG. If you wanted a tablet with a dock, you’d end up with a tablet that had a dual-headed cable on the inside, or a cable that comes with 5 heads in the box for you to choose the right one. When i want something to work, having a cable on the inside just looks cheesy. I have cheap mp3 speakers that look like that. i can go to Walgreens, and find 6 fake-name-off-brand “boom-less” boxes, ipod carriers, and speakers, that have a slide-away compartment and a 2-wire plug for audio, all for under $30 apiece. Who wants to fuck with cables? Who wants more chachkees? I have boxes of inverters, cables, adapters, plugs, and chargers from every cell phone, iPhone and iPod that passed through my hands. i don’t want more crap if i buy a phone-dock-pad-tablet-converter-thingie(That’s why i buy Apple; minimial crap). So when Joe Pro sits down with his new G-Pad Dock, and opens up the bottom to stick his phone in there, and he’ll have to click/tap a few thigns once he gets his phone into it, and closes it back up, he’ll be ready to start the meeting… but he’ll be 30 seconds behind, and everyone stares at him.
If i know there’s a phone-pad combo i can get, and it’s not going to cost me the same as a smart phone and a tablet, i might jump on it. But a universal device would be a hard sell.