Asus PadFone review

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The "PadFone" is technically just a cellphone. It looks exactly like you'd imagine, coming from the company behind the Transformer tablets: it's full of tapered edges and metallic finishes, and the concentric circle design of the phone's back feels like a cross-section of the Transformer Prime. The design touches are nice, though the PadFone doesn't feel quite as good to hold as the other tablets and almost feels a bit slippery. The body tapers sharply toward the back of the phone, making it feel smaller than it is — even with a 4.3-inch display, the PadFone's completely usable in one hand.

The phone's front face is, intentionally or otherwise, an awful lot like the iPhone's. There's a small silver bar at the top for the earpiece, next to the front-facing camera lens. Instead of the iPhone's physical button below the display, there's an Asus logo, but the overall effect of the two are remarkably similar. The logo looks fine when the display is off, but along with Android 4.0's persistent on-screen buttons it makes the phone look pretty cluttered when it's turned on.

There's a power button atop the PadFone's five-inch tall body, next to a 3.5mm headphone jack. Two separated volume buttons sit on the right side — they're a little mushy, but presses always registered without too much pressure. On the left side are Micro USB and Micro HDMI ports, mercifully uncovered by port flaps of any kind. The only thing really missing here is a dedicated camera button (or a way to repurpose one of the volume buttons, which is a great workaround), but that's sadly an all-too-rare feature.

Around back, you'll find the 8-megapixel camera lens sticking slightly out of the ridged back, along with a speaker, an LED flash, and a nice-looking etched PadFone logo. The back's removable, and since the SIM and microSD slots are both underneath, you'll have to get used to prying the panel off from the small notch at the bottom.

This is purely a matter of personal preference, but I think 4.3 inches might be the perfect size for a phone display. The Padfone's screen is big enough to be eye-catching, but I can still use it in one medium-sized hand. The screen's only okay, though: its 960 x 540 resolution can't measure up to the 720p displays on most current high-end phones, and colors all look a bit washed out. Months of working with Nilay Patel, the world's biggest hater of jaggy icons, has left me unable to forgive screens where individual pixels are visible — the PadFone has that problem everywhere you look.

On the plus side, viewing angles are great, and the screen is very responsive. It also appears really close to the glass above it, unlike a lot of phones where the display feels far away from your finger. It's not so much that this is a terrible display, it just hasn't been a good one since 720p and Retina displays became the norm with devices like the HTC One X or the iPhone.

The PadFone Station is what puts the Pad in PadFone. The 10.1-inch tablet looks a lot like a Transformer Pad, from the 16:9 aspect ratio to the shades of gray and black that form its hard plastic body. The 1.6-pound device isn't nearly as high-end or well-made as the other Transformers, though: its design is incredibly simple, without many of the stylish touches of Asus' other tablets. It's also really thick, at 13.5mm, and its body has bumps and ridges that keep it from every lying flat on a surface — it'll always wobble a bit when you press or tap on it.

The PadFone Station is totally, completely powered by the PadFone. All your files, apps, even your Wi-Fi or data connection is provided by the phone, which is a pretty great idea: you won't need to pay for a second data plan, or worry about clunky tethering solutions. There's a door that opens at the top of the tablet's back, with three ports that let you connect the PadFone. Connection is easy and usually only takes a second or two to switch over, though a handful of times it didn't seem to take — it showed an endlessly spinning loading wheel, and I had to disconnect and re-dock the device to get it to work.

Once the phone is connected and the door closed, the Station springs to life as an Ice Cream Sandwich tablet. The Station has a 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800 display, which is pretty standard for an Android tablet. It's just like the smaller display: it's fine but not great, with lots of washed out colors and jaggy text. It also has a loud speaker pointing out the back, which takes over all audio from the phone — it's a pretty good speaker, actually, though since it's directly on the back it gets easily muffled by your lap or a blanket.

The best thing the Station adds is an absolutely gigantic battery. Its 6600mAh of power is nearly four times the size of the PadFone's own battery, and since the tablet charges the phone when the two are docked it's also the best mobile charger you could imagine.

The PadFone's two cameras are essentially the perfect mean of smartphone shooters. The rear camera takes 8-megapixel shots, but photos are very soft, colors very washed out, and options for improving them very limited. The f/2.2 lens is bright for a smartphone, and the PadFone does do slightly better in low light than a lot of phones I've tested, but it's not really a meaningful improvement. The front-facing camera is incredibly noisy, and you shouldn't use it to shoot anything you want to preserve, but it's good enough for video chat. I've seen a lot of better smartphone cameras, and a lot of worse ones — this is firmly, exactly in the middle. Both cameras are available whether the PadFone is docked or not, the rear through a hole in the Station's case and the front through a lens on the Station itself.

Same goes for the 1080p video captured by the PadFone. It's really soft and noisy even in the best of lighting, and virtually unusable in low light. You can zoom (digitally) and autofocus during recording, which is nice, but as with still shots the PadFone's not a good bet for saving and preserving precious memories.

Asus has typically avoided making a lot of changes to Android with its tablets, so it's no surprise that the PadFone is running a near-stock version of Android 4.0.3. It's the same French Vanilla flavor of Ice Cream Sandwich as the Transformer Pad: a couple of small cosmetic changes to icons and notification menus, a new keyboard, and very little else. The effect is the same, too: Android runs quickly and smoothly on the PadFone, with fewer hiccups than ever — and, since you can download Chrome and get the updated version of Gmail, you get a better app experience as well.

Ice Cream Sandwich was the version of Android designed for both tablets and phones — if you didn't know that before, spend three seconds with the PadFone and you'll figure it out. The basic interface changes depending on which mode you're in, unlike previous versions of Android that would just stretch and expand everything to make it fit. It's a really nice experience — it makes the PadFone feel 100 percent like a phone and 100 percent like a tablet.

Unfortunately, the other thing the switching back and forth makes clear is just how bad phone apps look on a bigger screen. Whether you're using Twitter or Rdio (just to name two of a very long list), you get an app that looks fine on the PadFone's 4.3-inch display and terrible on its 10.1-inch screen. UI elements get stretched, screen real estate goes unused, and things just don't feel optimized. I found that for a lot of apps I'd pull the phone out and use it separately, just so the app would look right again.

The few apps that look good at both sizes, like Instapaper, only serve to throw Android's tablet app issues into sharper relief. Instapaper is brand new to Android, and its interface actually changes slightly depending on the screen size you're using, so you get an app that looks native to both resolutions — much like the universal apps for iOS. It's a breath of fresh air, and makes it painfully obvious that not enough developers are paying attention to Android tablets.

There's not much bloatware to be found on the PadFone, though it's impossible to say whether or not the relative scarcity would carry over to any US variants. Asus preloads a few apps, from the DLNA app MyNet to the awesome SuperNote, which lets you combine text, handwriting, drawing, images and more into a single notebook and then share it easily. There are a handful of other third-party apps as well, but unfortunately I'd expect the number to be much higher if the PadFone ever makes it stateside.