Hasta La Gadget!

Nothing like a leaked video to get you pumped about a product. Of course, we’re not suggesting that ASUS went out of its way to post information about the forthcoming Fonepad 7, but either way, that teaser piqued our curiosity. Now that ASUS has officially unveiled the product here at IFA, though, we can confirm these are fairly minor upgrades to the company’s original 7-inch, talk-enabled phone / tablet crossbreed. Namely, ASUS moved to glossy back cover and (as we saw in that video) added an extra speaker on the front side.

Not that this isn’t a good speaker setup. A number of companies have tried and failed to perfect the art of speaker placement, but we quite like what ASUS did here. For starters, they actually, you know, face you while they’re playing. Quite the innovation, we know. And while they’re placed near where you hold the device when it’s in landscape mode, it’s quite easy to grip it without muffling the sound. That said, we weren’t able to get the sound all that loud when we played around with it in the echoey halls of Berlin’s Hotel de Rome. The sound was easily drowned out by the admittedly larger MemoPad 10.%Gallery-slideshow79397%

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile, ASUS

Comments

Back when ASUS first introduced that unorthodox FonePad to the masses at MWC, the Taiwanese company said the 7-inch device would be arriving in the European market at some point in March. Fast forward to today — a couple of weeks late, no less — and ASUS has announced that those in the United Kingdom can now start making pre-orders, with the Jelly Bean-loaded phone / tablet hybrid expected to ship on April 26th. Just as we’d heard in Barcelona, the FonePad’s set to come with a £179.99 price tag, which, in return, gives folks a decent 1,280 x 800 IPS screen, an Atom Z2420 1.2GHz chip with 1GB of RAM, 16GB of built-in storage and a 4,270mAh battery — plus, of course, the HSPA+ radio to boot. Online stores like Carphone Warehouse and Amazon are all set to take your money, just make sure you also buy some jeans with big pockets, because you’ll certainly need a pair if you plan to use the PadFone FonePad to make calls in grandiose fashion.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, ASUS

Comments

Source: ASUS