If there’s one thing ASUS is known for, it’s creating interesting products that often offer more than one use case and these days at least three different use cases. Today at Computex 2014, ASUS took wraps off of the Transformer Book V (as in the Roman numeral for ‘five’) and well, it’s a pretty awesome piece of hardware. It’s a Windows laptop, a Windows tablet and it has a detachable Android smartphone. Think a PadFone, but running both Windows and Android in their own way. It was displayed under glass cabinets at the show and it looks like this could be more of a proof-of-concept than anything else.
No matter what it turns out to be the Transformer Book V is a cool machine, no doubt about it. It’s a Windows 8.1 tablet that’s running on an Intel Core CPU, which can be simply docked into a keyboard to become a Windows 8 laptop. The cool part for us Android fans is that there’s a ZenFone 5 lookalike that slots into the back of the tablet (or display depending on which ‘mode’ you’re in). This 5-inch Android phone is powered by the same quad-core Intel CPU inside the new MEMO Pad 7 and 8. While Android and Windows here don’t talk to each other like they do on the PadFone, the phone is accessible like any other MTP storage device from within Windows.
The tablet side of things is a 12.5-inch HD display, 4GB of RAM, an Intel Core CPU and a 128GB SSD in the tablet itself. The keyboard dock features a 1TB HDD as well, but doesn’t have any added battery power as the tablet is said to last up to 10 hours when browsing the web. The phone is much like a ZenFone 5, featuring a 2,500 mAh battery, 2GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera and expandable storage.
ASUS made no promise of a release date or even a tentative price tag, but if this guy does end up hitting the market, we can’t imagine something like this coming cheap, but those on the go that prefer Android to Windows Phone, this is an exciting product.