Asus PadFone Review

Media 

Asus hasn’t messed around too much with the stock music player, which is not a bad thing since ICS comes with a pretty mean one. You can sort your songs by Recent, Albums, Artists, Songs, Playlists or Genre. The player has a clean look to it and you even get audio enhancements by default. The great bit is that the player also supports FLAC files now. The audio quality is good with a decent pair of earphones and the volume is quite loud even without the enhancements. 

Media playback is good

The one place where we feel Asus could have done better is the video area. Since we are stuck with the stock player, there’s only support for MP4 videos. 1080p videos play just fine though, even through pen drives plugged into the keyboard dock's USB port. Videos look crisp and sharp on the phone while the tablet screen is just about average. It doesn’t seem like Asus has used an IPS display for the PadFone Station. Despite that, docking in the phone while watching videos is a good idea since you get a bigger screen and the sound is also a lot fuller as the audio is routed to the larger speaker in the PadFone Station. 

Connectivity 

The PadFone is a quad-band GSM device, but supports only two bands for 3G: 900 and 1200. It still does 21Mbps down and 5.76Mbps up, so it’s still on par with most other smartphones. Other connectivity options include Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth but no NFC. For storage, you get 16GB built-in along with a hot-swap microSD card slot under the cover, which expands it by up to 32GB. 

Browsing the web is a pleasant experience thanks to the fast CPU

We also have Asus WebStorage with unlimited web storage space for one year, after which you have to pay a fee to continue the service. MyCloud lets you quickly browse and sort out your media files saved in the cloud. One feature we really like is App Locker. It essentially lets you put a common password for whichever app you want so you can, for example, prevent nosy people from snooping through your private picture collection.

The stylus/headset is part of the bundle

Miscellaneous Apps 

Other apps include MyLibrary, which lets you read Ebooks and popular news publications. Kindle app also comes bundled. There’s MovieStudio for editing your captured videos, Polaris Office for working on Office documents and spreadsheets.