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Watch ASUS' PadFone 2 Milan press conference from the safety of your home (video)
Spend yesterday away from the internet? ASUS' launch of the new PadFone 2 might have passed you by. Fortunately, we live in the internet age, where any action can be reviewed and examined to Zapruder-esque proportions. If you'd like to relive the press conference as if you were there with Jonney Shih in Milan, grab yourself an espresso and catch the footage we've tucked after the break.
Docks, transformers, computing cores and taking it all with you
Back in the mists of history -- probably the late '90s or early '00s -- I remember reading a blog post. I'm afraid I have been unable to find it again, so you'll have to take my reminiscing on faith (but please leave a comment if you know what I'm talking about). This post dissected and analyzed a collection of freshly granted IBM patents which, taken together, painted a picture of the future of personal computing that has stayed with me ever since. In essence, they called for each person to be carrying around a personal "computing core" -- a device we'd recognize today as a modern smartphone, although it was close to science fiction back then -- that could be docked into a variety of shells to become other devices, such as a laptop or a desktop. While Apple's PowerBook Duo subnotebooks were designed to transform into desktop computers when docked with their base units, they didn't quite meet the pocketable part of the 'computing core' definition. I was reminded of this recently when reading Anandtech's review of the clumsily-named Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101. If you're unfamiliar with it, the Eee Pad looks, at first glance, like Yet Another Identikit Android Tablet, as it has very similar specs to the rest of them -- Android Honeycomb software, dual core NVidia Tegra 2 system-on-a-chip processor, 1 GB RAM and so forth. The Asus, however, has two key things in its favor. Firstly, for the baseline Wi-Fi/16 GB configuration, it's $100 cheaper than the iPad. Secondly, it works with a $150 laptop dock accessory that turns it into a netbook.
Palm creating palmtop computer with detachable, dockable cellphone?
Hold on to your Foleos, folks, because it looks like Palm still hasn't given up on the idea of a little laptop that pairs with a phone for wireless communications. However, where that former (failed) experiment called for entirely disparate hardware, here the relationship between the two would be rather more formal. In a patent filed in April and just dug up by Unwired View, Palm describes a "compact removable voice handset" and an "integrated palmtop computer." The two can communicate wirelessly, but more interestingly they can be coupled such that "there is minimal increase to the overall size and weight" of the palmtop -- in other words, the "phone" bit isn't particularly large, making it more comfortable to hold up to your face in a conversation than your Streaks and the like. Is there actually any hardware behind this application or is this just Palm daydreaming about a Foleo 2? We'll all just have to wait and find out.
