Asus Padfone: Due this Christmas, possibly running Honeycomb 3.1

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More details are trickling in regarding the Padfone, a phone-turned-tablet device that Asus officially announced this morning at Computex. Engadget went hands-on with a device mockup Asus has been showing off at the Computex show. More importantly, they squeezed out a target release date and other tidbits from their manager Benson Lin.

ASUS’ Benson Lin was careful not to openly admit the company intends to ship with Ice Cream Sandwich, but he did point out that you can’t launch a smartphone with Honeycomb as the OS. We were encouraged to draw our own conclusions.

Go past the fold for a couple more tidbits…

Asus is shooting for a Christmas release, the publication reported, when a second-generation Transformer and Slider are also due. The Padfone smartphone can be housed inside a tablet shell to double as a portable computer akin to the Eee Transformer Pad. The phone and the tablet communicate via microHDMI and USB, with the latter also supplying power to the phone from the tablet shell batteries.