Tablet teasers aren’t really my thing, but Asus has piqued my interest by promising more than just another thin touch screen slab.
At the Computex trade show next week, Asus will reveal a device that it says will “break the rules.” A teaser image shows what looks like a tablet and phone coming together, along with a tagline: “Pad or Phone? How About Both?”
As Engadget points out, Asus may be taking a stab at modular computing, with a smartphone that docks into a tablet. It could be kind of like Motorola’s Atrix 4G, but with a large touch screen instead of a laptop dock. Previous teaser images from Asus validate this theory; if you look at the image below, it kind of looks like one device embedded into another:
Asus has already toyed with the modular concept in its Eee Pad Transformer tablet. An optional keyboard and trackpad dock turns that tablet into a netbook, with extra ports, longer battery life and a tilting stand for the screen. A modular tablet, I imagine, would rely on the smartphone for all its processing power. The dual-core processors found in high-end smartphones as certainly up for the job.
But consider this scenario: What if this mystery device is a phone that docks into a tablet, which itself supports the Eee Pad Transformer keyboard dock? That’d make it a modular phone-tablet-netbook hybrid.
Speculative mind? Blown.