ASUS has been pushing its PadFone line in Asia for a long time now, but it’s taken the Taiwanese company a long time to get these devices on shelves over here in the US. AT&T launched the PadFone X earlier this year and while it’s not the best smartphone nor the best tablet that you can buy it’s an interesting concept on the whole and one that many will find convenient. After all, our phones are still the center of our daily lives with our tablets taking a back seat, so why not make our phone the tablet at the end of the day? For those that prefer both smaller smartphones and smaller tablets, ASUS and AT&T will soon be launching a new PadFone X, dubbed the Mini that is a 7-inch tablet and a 4.5-inch smartphone.
Hitting AT&T’s 4G network on October 24th, the PadFone X Mini is essentially the PadFone Mini that ASUS announced earlier this year during Mobile World Congress, but there are a few changes that the AT&T version will get. The phone is a 4.5-inch IPS+ 854 x 480 packing device which is powered by a dual-core Intel Atom Z2580 at 1.6 Ghz with 1GB of RAM backing it up. On the rear of the device there’s a 5-megapixel camera with a 1-megapixel camera backing it up around the front. It’s running Android 4.4 KitKat and it’s all powered by a removable 2,060 mAh battery. On to the tablet display and we’re looking at a 7-inch 1280 x 800 display with a 2,200 mAh battery that should extend the whole life of the device. There’s 16GB of included storage which is expandable to 64GB as well.
Will full support for AT&T’s 3G and 4G network, you’ll be able to get online with either the phone itself or the PadFone X Mini as a complete tablet and while the specs of this pairing isn’t great, the PadFone X Mini is only going to retail for $199.99 on contract with plans that start at $40 a month and there’s word that you’ll be able to buy the device from ASUS themselves, whether or not this means with or without a contract remains to be seen, but ASUS has done a good job at providing their devices at lower than most manufacturers charge for their devices so this could be a good way of trying out a PadFone X without breaking the bank.