At the beginning of this year we posted about the ASUS Padfone and how it was essentially three devices in one, a smartphone, tablet and laptop. This multi-fuctional device basically was a smartphone that could plug into a tablet “dock”, using the smartphone as the brains, and could even become a laptop by pairing the tablet screen with a keyboard connector.

The bad news is that it has yet to make its way over the US, until now … sort of. Negri Electronics is offering the international, imported version within the states for $859.50, and while this isn’t exactly cheap, keep in mind it comes with the docking station as well. For those who need a reminder, the Asus Padfone features a 4.3-inch Super Amoled qHD display, Snapdragon S4 with Adreno 225 GPU, 16GB internal storage, MicroSD expansion, 8MP camera, and the 10.1-inch tablet docking station. It also doesn’t hurt to know that it runs Android 4.0 ICS as its OS.

While $859.50 is a bit on the high side, to say the least, if you really can’t wait any longer to get your hands on the ASUS Padfone, this is certainly one way to do it. Before you dish out so much money though, it is important to note that it is coming to the United States through official channels via AT&T’s network soon enough. From the sounds of it, as soon as late-June or sometime in July.

There is no word on how much the Padfone with it’s docking station will cost through AT&T but with a 2-year contract you can bet it certainly will be under $859.50.

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Imagine one device that manages to successfully act as a smartphone, tablet, and a netbook. This is exactly what Asus is aiming for with its Padfone.

According to MoDaCo’s founder, Paul O’Brien, he has apparently heard straight from Asus that the Padfone will in fact be shown off at the Mobile World Congress on February 27^th.

How this works is pretty simple, it is a smartphone that plugs into a tablet display dock. The dock simply has the speakers, larger display, extra battery, and tablet buttons. The power and OS all come from the phone, which is said to operate Android 4.0 and have a quad-core Tegra 3 processor.

So, this covers the tablet/smartphone side, but how do you turn it into a netbook? The Padfone is supposedly compatible with its Transformer keyboard dock, actually.

This is no doubt an ingenius design. Now you just have to wonder what carriers will support it and when we’ll actually see such an amazing three-way hybrid hit the streets.

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Even so, I made my way over to the Asus booth to get a closer look. It’s really too bad that they don’t even have a working prototype or engineering sample to show us, since they were dummy devices in the cases. They’re not operational at all, so it’s almost like the Padfone is nothing more than a proof of concept.

In any case, I did get a closer look at how the docking mechanism appears to work. Out the back of the tablet part, there’s a flap that opens up to reveal where you put the smartphone. The assumption is that the smartphone will have a miniUSB port on its left side. This would likely line up with a miniUSB connector on the inside of the dock.

You’ll also notice that there is a hole cut out in the dock cover. This allows the camera on the smartphone portion to still be usable when in the tablet dock. Strangely, the cutout does not seem to allow for the flash to work, but this design could see several alterations before the Padfone becomes a real product.

I’m not sure how I feel about the Padfone, to be honest. It could prove to be an epic game changer, but it could also prove to be a monumental disaster (assuming it ever gets out of the vaporware stage).

The post A Closer Look at The Asus Padfone Smartphone Tablet Dock appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

And why not? Asus is is set to release their own re-engineered iteration of the Motorola Atrix 4G dock, riping out the keyboard making a dockable smartphone slate, we have the PadFone. This is a new generation of devices to hit the streets and all they are is just a shell without the guts and brains. Slide your smartphone into the PadFone, and you have just made buying a computer more efficient. Rather than two massively destructive impacts on the earth, you have just one marginally less destructive. We know computers, tablets and smartphone components are made with rare earth metals, by keeping the smartphone as the core processor and simply giving it a shell to transform within, Acer has just lessend your impact on the planet. There’s nothing stopping Asus from making an identical clone of the Atrix 4G dock too, we’re sure that will come soon.

The Asus phone within is with a 4.3-inch display, while the tablet amps it up to 10.1-inches. The Padfone is sort of a tablet dock in a way, it will have its own battery that can extend the life of the smartphone, and the phone will be mirrored to the tablet utilizing all its features. The tablet’s screen resolution is reported to be 1280 x 800. Although specifics weren’t released about the smartphone itself, we can guess that it will come with the 1GHz Tegra 2 processor with 1GB RAM, 16GB flash storage, a 1.2-megapixels on the front and 5-megapixels on the back, gyroscope, compass, GPS and all the trimmings.

Rumours are the PadFone combo could be one of the first devices to run Ice Cream Sandwich, the upcoming Android version which will be used across all sorts of devices. The PadFone could be released at the end of this year. No pricing has been announced for the PadFone but GizMag is reporting it to be in the US$800-1,000 range, probably too much since a consumer could still buy both standalone devices for the same price or less. The “lapdock” for the Atrix is selling on Motorola’s website now for $500.

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