If the phone in your pocket was powerful enough to be a computer, why buy a separate tablet at all? Why pay for two data plans when your phone has enough processing power to theoretically also power a tablet—and if you add a keyboard and mouse—could convert from phone to tablet to laptop?
This was the idea behind the concept Asus introduced at Computex in 2011. This new idea from Asus seemed very futuristic, and despite some clever engineering that overall delivered on its promise, it was ultimately the software that prevented the Asus Padfone from being truly great. This was thanks in part to a new hybrid version of Android that gave developers extra work to properly translate their apps to this new form factor, which for the most part didn’t happen.
Let’s look back at this ambitious product of 2012 to see how it paved the way for some of the products and trends in mobile we’re seeing today.
The premise
An attempt at a truly all-in-one device
The premise was one device, one SIM, one data plan (before the days of unlimited data), with no need for syncing between phone and tablet. This concept had been previously attempted in 2011 with Motorola Atrix 4G, which was a more simplified version of the Padfone where the laptop part had its own discrete operating system. It failed because of sluggish performance, expensive pricing, and consumer confusion over the premise.
The Padfone full kit, which included the phone itself (a 4.3″ qHD phone with a Snapdragon S4 Plus dual-core CPU with 1GB of RAM and up to 64GB of storage), the tablet (which was basically just a 10.1″ 1280×800 screen), plus the keyboard and stylus, cost a hefty $1300 in 2012, which is equal to around $1890 today.
A phone that turned into a tablet
The tablet itself, which Asus called the Padfone Station, was essentially just a 10.1″ “dumb” screen, also inclusive of a large battery, that would come to life only when you docked your Padfone into the docking station on the back. When it powered on, the tablet would be fully powered by the phone’s processor and software, with the tablet only contributing extra battery power and the screen itself. One major factor that made people return the Padfone at high rates was weight: the tablet with the phone docked was heavy at almost 2lbs, plus it was unevenly weighted due to the batteries, versus the original iPad which weighed just 1.5lbs.
The Padfone full kit cost $1300 in 2012, which is equal to around $1890 today.
And a tablet that could become a notebook
To take things to the next step, after docking the phone inside the tablet, you could then dock the tablet to the Asus keyboard, which gave you a netbook-like computing experience with a keyboard and trackpad. In 2012, Android certainly wasn’t optimized for laptop experiences and using the Padfone in laptop mode was a clunky endeavor of running blown up phone apps with no multi-window support like we have today.
But the biggest problem wasn’t the hardware.
Software was the biggest problem
It wasn’t a good phone and it wasn’t a good tablet
Google was caught off guard when the iPad launched in 2010 and was a smash hit (and today is still the default tablet for most).
You see, back then Google maintained two separate operating systems — Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” was their phone OS, and Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” was their ill-fated and rushed tablet operating system. Then came Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich”, which was supposed to unify both, and the Padfone was one of the first devices to run Ice Cream Sandwich. But it had a major problem.
Ice cream sandwich had something called dynamic display switching, and this was the key software technology Asus was relying on to make the Padfone work. The promise was actually amazing in theory: start one activity (like watching a movie) on your phone, then slide your phone into a larger display, like your Asus Padfone tablet, and the movie picks up where it left off but on a larger screen, all with the simple and satisfying click of docking your phone with the tablet. Only, it didn’t work like that most of the time.
In Android 4.0, changing screen dimensions caused something called “activity destruction”, which terminates the app in RAM and tries to restart it with the new display configuration. To remedy this, developers had to rewrite their apps to dictate how to save their exact state during an activity destruction, and how to reload that state once reconfigured. Almost no developers spent the time updating their apps to allow for this seamless dynamic display switching that would have made the Padfone the versatile device Asus wanted it to be, which meant that only first-party Asus apps could smoothly move from phone to tablet mode. All other apps would have to basically force close and reload when going from phone to tablet on the Padfone, which was a terrible and jarring user experience that again contributed to the Padfone having a very high return rate.
It was both a mediocre phone and a bad tablet. Most reviewers at the time looked at the astronomical price and concluded that for the asking price of $1300, most people would be best served by just buying both a phone and tablet, instead of a singular device that was not particularly good at either of those things.
But Asus thought of everything
Credit where credit is due — Asus really thought of everything back in 2012. For example, if you got a phone call on your Padfone, you obviously wouldn’t hold the tablet to your head or undock the phone, and using speakerphone might not have been appropriate.
So Asus built a speaker and mic into the stylus so that you could take calls on it over Bluetooth by holding the stylus to your head. It looked ridiculous, but it was a clever solution to a novel problem.
There was a successor
It was too late
In 2014, AT&T tried again with the newer Padfone X at a heavily subsidized price of $199 with a two-year contract (AT&T saw a big opportunity with the Padfone X as a way to lock-in consumers by keeping them at the carrier for both their tablet and phone connectivity, so they were willing to heavily subsidize the product) but it was not successful, despite having a faster quad-core CPU and double the RAM of the original Padfone.
Consumers found the Padfone X too big and bulky and Android’s tablet issues were still present at a time when the iPad was really taking off and offered a ground-up premium tablet experience with software built to match. Not only that, but the Padfone X had to be demonstrated at AT&T stores for consumers to “get it” and that friction made it challenging to be able to properly convey the product benefits in retail for such a unique product.
Foldables have fulfilled Padfone’s aim
In 2026, we’ve solved this problem, but Asus’ attempt 14 years ago is commendable
It turns out that a solution to this 2012 problem was already waiting in the wings many years later: foldables (like the new Z Fold 8, which we love), offer you the benefits of a phone when you need it and can convert into a tablet when you want it, all from the same device with the same data plan. It’s kind of what Asus sought to do, but they were too early.
The Padfone was a brave attempt at convergence but ultimately was too ahead of its time, limited most by limitations in hardware and especially software.