Asus Padfone 2 review

Asus may not enjoy the high kudos of some of its rivals, but it certainly knows how to make its products stand out. The Transformer Pad gave us one of the first tablet/laptop hybrids with a detachable screen; the Taichi was a laptop with not one, but two displays; the Fonepad is a seven-inch tablet you can use as a phone. With the Padfone 2, the Chinese manufacturer has done it again with another solution to the phone-or-tablet problem -- why not have both? 

The Padfone 2 is on sale now for around £600.

Design
The Padfone 2 comes in two parts. The first is a tablet with a 10.1-inch screen. From the front it looks like a standard thick-bezel tablet with the usual all-glass front, curved back and tactile plastic rear cover.
But set into the back is a docking station for the accompanying 4G smartphone.


 Where Asus has been clever is that the tablet is actually a dummy -- it won't work unless you have the smartphone plugged into the dock. So you're effectively getting a phone and tablet for the price of a high-end smartphone.

 It's a sound idea -- slip the phone in your pocket when you're out and about. Slip it into the dock when you're home or at work to take advantage of the big screen for easier browsing, movie watching and more. All your apps, data and updates are ever-present on both devices without the need to set up any awkward syncing.


The phone looks pretty good on its own with its neatly bevelled edges, sleekly tapering aluminium siding and textured back plate. The usual three Android soft-touch buttons sit beneath the 4.7-inch Super IPS+ screen which offers a very respectable HD resolution of 1,280x720 pixels.
That may put it a little behind the very best, such as the HTC One or Samsung Galaxy S4 with their 1,920x1,080-pixel screens, but it's deliciously vivid with good contrast and vibrant colours. It's protected behind a sheet of scratch-resistant Corning Glass with an anti-fingerprint coating that certainly has an effect, though don't expect it to banish the fingerprint issue forever.

 The tablet's 1,280x800 resolution isn't quite so impressive, and a long way behind the iPad's 2,048x1,536. Still, it's not bad by any means, and the sheer size makes it a no-brainer for watching movies, web browsing and ebook reading. But perhaps oddly, the automatic brightness setting appears to have been set deliberately low, which means it doesn't look as well as it might. You can get it looking more vibrant using the manual settings but it hits the the battery pretty hard.


Features and performance
Plug the phone into the tablet and it will automatically switch off any application not especially designed for both phone and tablet and you can then restart them. The single large speaker on the back gives a considerable boost to the phone's modest output and while it can't do thumping bass, it's good enough to enjoy a movie with or listen to music on your own. There's 32GB of storage on board but there's no option to add more via microSD card.
It would have been nice to have a standard microUSB charging port on the tablet, same as the phone, but unfortunately it uses one of Asus's proprietary designs, which means you'll have to carry two cables.


The processor is a quad-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon backed by a full 2GB RAM and it's got plenty of poke. Apps open in a twinkling and there was no noticeable sign of lag when browsing or viewing HD movies, not even with processing-heavy 3D games like Real Racing 3, which sped by without a hitch. Our AnTuTu performance benchmark test delivered a score of 21,684, which puts it very close to its quad-core rival the HTC One, though still a ways behind the Galaxy S4. Performance remained at a similar level whether the phone was on its own or plugged into the tablet's dock.
It's running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, so not quite the very latest 4.2 version, but that doesn't seem to hold it back. The latest incarnation has a few fixes and upgrades but it's not hugely different from its predecessor. Unlike the reimagined interfaces of handsets from HTC and Samsung, Asus has left the Android look more or less alone, but while it might not be distinctive, there's really nothing wrong with that.


Asus hasn't stinted on the camera specifications either. The 13-megapixel model has a large F2.4 aperture to help in low-light conditions and a range of exposure options and photo modes, including panorama and HDR. The settings menu appears when you slide your finger in from the right, while touch focus allows you to set any part of the frame as the focal point, and a long press locks it.
You can take a pic by pressing an icon on the screen or by pressing the volume slider on the side. A quick press gets you a picture, but keep pressing and it will keep snapping, giving you a range of options to choose from.
Picture quality is very good overall, with good colour balance, sharp edges and a good amount of detail.

 The 2,140mAh phone battery held up pretty well, delivering a good day and a half of steady use but fortunately the tablet has its own 5,000 mAh battery on board, so you don't strain the power from the phone when it's docked

 Conclusion
As a combi deal with a high-end smartphone and matching tablet the Asus Padfone 2 is more than a gimmick -- it's a pretty good deal. The phone's spec may not quite match the very best, but the differences are minimal, and hey, you're getting a good-quality tablet thrown in for roughly the same price. Syncing between the two is hassle-free and though the tablet is a tad heavy with the phone docked into the back, it's a perfectly good way to get the best of both worlds.