It's a phone. It's a camera. It's a tablet. It's a laptop. No, it's the Asus PadFone. Whew! Can we say "all-in-one", or perhaps, "all-together-now"? It is said, "a picture is worth a thousand words", and believe me, we're not going that far with this article.

Like the Fujitsu Lifebook, the photos will help, so we'll sprinkle a few of those along the path of enlightenment. Feel free to skip ahead to look at all of them right about now. I'll wait.

Oh, you're back. Well all-righty-then. Let's stroll on down that path to see what else we find.

How it works

Basically the brains are in the camera, and the battery-brawn is beefier in the tablet and keyboard-dock components. All three of those have their own batteries. The PadFone's Snapdragon processor is more powerful than most tablet CPUs.

The PadFone with camera snaps into the tablet shell and becomes, you guessed it, a tablet. The tablet then docks onto the keyboard and (tah-dah!) becomes a laptop. The Pad-Fone's talk-time increases dramatically with both arrangements. Combined with the stylus-headset, you've got several laptop components cooperating as a single notebook.

The combination stylus-headset can be used for writing on the tablet, and also becomes a Bluetooth headset, which enables calls with the PadFone docked in the tablet. When docked in the tablet shell the Fone's 8MP rear camera can still snap photos through an aperture in the back of the tablet's case. The word unwieldy comes to mind. Combined into its laptop form, this thing is definitely thicker and heavier than the sum-total of the XPS 13 Dell parts, for example.

	Specifications
Software	Android 4.0 (Ice cream Sandwich)
CPU	Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 8260A dual-core 1.5 GHz
Built-in Storage	16/32/64 GB eMMc Flash
Memory	1 GB RAM
Tablet Display	10.1" 1280x800 with capacitive multi-touch panel
Phone Display	4.3inches, qHD 960x540, Super AMOLED with capacitive multi-touch panel
Cameras	Front camera mega-pixel VGA Rear camera 8 mega-pixel auto-focus, with flash
Memory slot	Micro-SD card
Connectivity	WLAN 802.11 b/g/n
Networks	WCDMA, HSPA+, 3G, 2G, EDGE, GPRS, GSM
Sensors	E-Compass, G-Sensor, Motion, Proximity, Light, Gyroscope
Accessories	Station Dock, Stylus-headset, Sleeve

Assessment

The PadFone's design is not as imaginative or compelling as the Fujitsu Lifebook 2013 Concept Notebook. Strangely though, it will prove much more useful than the Lifebook. The PadFone's keyboard-dock transforms it into something that actually does function more like a laptop because of the physical keys, which are lacking on the Lifebook.

Both designs suffer from the disparate life-cycles of smartphones, tablets, and notebooks. No one wants to replace three devices in order to upgrade their phone, or so they can switch phone-service carriers. Very few will be willing to abandon their current phone-service carrier in order to buy this device. Asus may have a work-around such as an unlocked phone so that any carrier that is willing to support it (if they are willing) can be selected.

That still does not change the fact that most people want to replace their smartphones more frequently than their laptops.  Perhaps a 'new-and-improved' PadFone would be made available and compatible with the existing set-up. That would spoil the fun. You would then have a new laptop component living in the innards of an outdated design.

That situation is not satisfactory to the vast majority of businesses and individual consumers. The interdependence of the laptop's parts is clearly problematic. In fact, you can be reasonably sure that no sane corporate enterprise IT department would buy either the Asus PadFone, or the Fujitsu Lifebook 2013 Concept Notebook. Dedicated gadget-lovers, however, will be thrilled.