Asus has another solution to the problem of wanting a phone and a tablet in one device and it isn’t a new one, though it may have been overlooked up till now.

Announced at MWC this year, the new Asus PadFone Infinity consists of two parts; a phone and a tablet dock. The PadFone Infinity handset packs in most of the hardware required for the tablet dock to function and slipping the phone into the tablet converts the hardware from a 5-inch smartphone to a 10.1-inch tablet.

The Infinity phone uses a quad-core 1.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 CPU, with an Adreno 320 GPU and 2GB of LPDDR2 RAM. Internal storage hasn’t been revealed but users will be getting 50GB free ASUS Webstorage for a period of two years. The device has a 13 megapixel rear and 2 megapixel front camera and a 5-inch Super IPS 1,920 x 1,080 display.

Slot it into the useless-without-the-phone dock however and all that hardware is used to power a 10.1-inch Super IPS 1,920 x 1,080 display, effectively giving you a tablet. By most accounts the current incarnation of the PadFone is a breeze to use as well.

Set to launch in Europe in April this year, with no dates or even availability confirmed for South Africa yet, the device is set to cost in the region of $1,300 (R11,500), meaning that this concept might prove too expensive for local wallets. A smartphone and tablet combination bought separately for cash would admittedly cost more locally but that additional cost would also give users two different sets of complete hardware to play with.

Source: AllThingsD