ASUS PadFone 2 - Review and recommendation

My first impression of the phone was that it's very light for its size, mostly due to fact that it's almost entirely made of plastic with a textured back and a frame and buttons made from brushed metal. Build quality is generally good - apart from a wiggling powerbutton and backlight bleeding through around the touch buttons - and there is no flex or creaking of the body. As a matter of fact, once you get used to its lightness it feels very solid indeed.

The tablet (or dock depending on your definition) is built from the same materials but feels weightier thanks to the great slab of glass on the front. The body is not as rounded and smooth as the phones' and it has some rough edges where plastic meets glass. There is no flex in the body but it does creak a bit on one side when held in the landscape position.

The highlight of the PadFone 2 (besides the obvious eye-catching docking design) and what really makes the it stand out is the screen: a crisp and bright 4,7 inch IPS+ display with good contrast and nice colors protected by Gorilla glass. The internals of the phone are also quite impressive with a snappy (pun very much intended) Snapdragon 4 processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM and Adreno 320 graphics. In leymans terms this makes menus, video and games run smooth with little or no lag although it does get very hot under heavy workloads, especially when docked with the tablet.

The tablet display is good but not nearly as bright or crisp as the display on the phone. I guess they had to cut some corners after all, but it's still a good quality screen with a resolution of 1280 by 800. On the back is a single speaker that produces tolerable sound and smack in the middle is a sizeable groove in the tablet body with a modified micro USB connector where the phone slides in when docked. When docked the phone sits snug and secure - so snug in fact that any type of protective case will have to be removed before docking.

The forward facing camera is excellent - much better than I expected from a phone camera - sporting 13 megapixels and producing nice, crisp images right out of the box. It's capable of recording video at 1080p with good image quality and decent sound. The inward facing one is a standard 1,3 megapixels and performs about average. Strangely though, the camera can only use up to 5.5 megapixels for photos and 720p for video when the phone is docked, but that's hardly a deal-breaker since wielding a ten inch tablet when taking photos is hardly ideal anyway. For a sample of the video-quality of the camera, see below:

When it comes to power my unscientific tests (mostly just playing Candy Crush until the battery runs out) indicate that battery life is pretty good, lasting up to 48 hours on a single charge under normal use (surf, texting and the occasional gaming). This, however, is where the unique abilities of the PadFone 2 phone/tablet combination comes into play. When docked the phone can be set to draw power from the battery in the tablet, thus expanding battery life greatly. If used lightly while docked the phone will charge to 80% in about 2 hours while still leaving more than 40% charge in the tablet.

The PadFone runs Android Jelly Bean 4.1.1 with all that this entails. ASUS has kept the interface pretty close to regular Android Jelly Bean and the amount of bloatware is minimal - a few ASUS-apps like MyNet and ASUS cloud storage are even quite useful. Third party software is - of course - available from Google Play and there's plenty of good apps there these days even though tablet-only apps are still regrettably few. Speaking of software: the main strength of this device is definitely the docking function and how the device handles switching between screens. Since you can use all the phones apps and functions in tablet mode which means you won't have to juggle multiple devices on the go. When you get a text you don't have to balance the tablet while digging through your pockets for your phone - it's all there on the tablets screen. When docked the phone will switch to displaying on the tablet screen with a small delay while the device prepares the home screen. Users have the option to select which apps are kept alive and which ones will close when docking or undocking.

  I have found no major problems in the software and experienced virtually no software crashes. One of the few quirks I have found is that apps running when the phone is docked won't show on the app-switching menu after and will have to be reopened from a shortcut. Not sure if this is really a bug though but aside from this minor annoyance I have unfortunately encountered a few proper system crashes - almost exclusively in connection with using the camera - which will either suddenly reboot the phone or render the phone completely unresponsive with the screen off for up to a few minutes. This has happened around three times in one week but seems to have caused no significant problems like corrupt or lost files. Hopefully this is a software problem that will be fixed soon and not another antenna-gate like the one that afflicted HTC's One X.

Accessory-wise, the phone comes with a sleeve that doubles as a stand which is a nice bonus. There's also the usual headphones, polishing cloth and a wallcharger. Unfortunately ASUS has opted for a non-standard connector instead of the more common micro USB which is unfortunate since the cable is rather short. They've thrown in an adapter though, and the port will accept and charge through a micro USB cable but it doesn't fit as well and might even damage the port if one isn't careful.

On the whole the PadFone 2 is an excellent device with a lot of versatility to it. The idea of docking the phone in the tablet is undoubtedly its main selling point and I'm inclined to agree as this sollution saves you the hassle of carrying multiple devices and SIM-cards while at the same time prolonging the battery life of your phone. The innovation isn't so much in the hardware as how it's designed to be used. I give it a four out of five for flexibility and portability as well as the raw power of the hardware. It falls short of a five due to a few glitches in the OS, mediocre quality of the tablet and the poor choice of a proprietary charging cable.

So who is it for? If you're in the market for either a tablet or a phone, you might find better value for your money elsewhere. While the phone on its own would be more than a match for any high end smartphone currently on the market it's still a bit pricey (I can't speak for the US but in europe the phone costs almost as much the complete package).

If, on the other hand, you're looking for both a phone and a tablet and got the money to spare, then this is perhaps the best bang for the buck currently on the market.