Asus has proved it has lots of good ideas (do we need a reminder regarding who started the netbook revolution?) And even now surprises us with great looking inovative devices like the Eee Pad Transformer; even if sometimes those experiments don't turn out so well, as the ill-fated Eee Keyboard.
But it doesn't stop here, ASUS has just announced the PadFone!
Just like the Eee Pad transformer is capable os transforming a Tablet into a netbook, this PadFone can turn a Smartphone into a tablet.
When we consider a high-end smartphone carries an hefty cost, and most of its hardware is shared with tablet devices, this would be a great way to offer an affordable tablet option to a smartphone carrying crowd. After all, the "dumb-tablet" is little more than a LCD screen and battery - with the smartphone carrying all the smarts (CPU, GPU, Ram, Flash, etc).
The only thing needed to turn this concept into a big success is: a really competitive price that will make people want the tablet dock.
Even better, if Asus goes the extra mile and allows this PadFone tablet to use the Eee Pad Transformer keyboard dock, we could then have a 3-in-1 device: a smartphone that could be used as a tablet or netbook at will!
Looks like a winner! Now they just need to come up with a Kal-El smartphone to really show off what this combo can do.
The point being if you have a camera using SD card or have a document to sent out which happened to be installed in a USB drive, you won't be able to do it through iwhatever. If Apple just surrender the external storage limitation and make camera connector owner to be able to read SD card/USB stick and pick one single file, not upload all to iwhatever, to send thru email or upload to dropbox/flikr/facebook/whatever cloud/social network, the above piece of product will never exist. But again, who said Apple give the general public any attention?
ReplyDeleteAnyone notice that on the behind the scenes video at about 1:30 they have the tablet and it seems they photoshopped the IE browser in there lol.
ReplyDelete@Andrew
ReplyDeleteYes, it was still a mock-up. :)
But, I'm sure this type of devices will become increasingly common in the future - particularly when Google launches its Android "Ice Cream".