Asus has shown a tablet concept at Computex that we always hoped for. A tablet shell that accommodates your smartphone. The Padfone from Asus does just this! Given that we have so many devices these days, it makes sense to use a common memory, 3G and other resources. The tablet has a screen size of 10.1″, while the phone has 4.3″.
While Asus hasn’t confirmed the specs, nor given a launch announcement for the same, we know this thing would run Ice-cream sandwich. Now since Google has hinted a Q4 launch for Android Ice-cream sandwich guess this thing would show up in retail stores only by year end or later. The only thing we could gather from Asus’ presentation is the 3G and memory sharing between both devices, we aren’t sure if the processor would be common for both of them, i.e. if the tablet shell would have its own processor or use the CPU from the phone. The video teaser also reveals that you can attend calls using bluetooth when on tablet mode.
For now, this is an interesting concept and we wouldn’t be surprised if other manufacturers are working on similar concepts. We kind of sniffed what Google might enable with in future when we saw the hack showing Honeycomb taking a Gingerbread avatar as soon as you change the pixel density of the screen.
So Honeycomb boots up with Android’s smartphone UI when you tweak the screen PPI. Imagine a tablet dock that has its own battery and uses the CPU, Memory, 3G and other resources from your smartphone and scales it to a tablet form? This might well be what Google wants future Android tablets to do.
