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ASUS announces a tablet, a phablet and … something very odd

ASUS announced a bunch of new products at Computex (via Engadget), with the relevant ones for us being a tablet, a phablet and … well, this.

The Transformer Book Trio is a weird hybrid laptop and tablet. Nothing especially odd there, you may think: it’s just an Android tablet with a detachable keyboard. Except in this case there’s a Windows 8 notebook housed in that keyboard, enabling the device to run both systems. Why Trio rather than Duo? It also comes with a dock housing a 750Gb hard drive and connectivity for an external monitor, which ASUS reckons makes it qualify as a desktop PC too … 

Both tablet and notebook are decent spec, the tablet running on a 2Ghz Atom chip with 11.6-inch 1080p screen, while the notebook/keyboard has a Haswell Core i7 processor. It’s not entirely clear how you’d share files between the Android and Windows sides, but ASUS refers to ‘syncing’, which suggests the two devices are essentially completely separate rather than sharing storage, and you sync via the cloud. Glue an iPad to the back and you’d have the perfect device for the terminally indecisive.

Availability is said to be Q3 this year, with no pricing yet announced.

Photo: Phandroid.com

The phablet is the FonePad Note, a device whose name and specs both suggest the company is going head-to-head with the Samsung Galaxy Note II. The 6-inch display manages full 1080p against the 720p in the 5.5-inch display of the Galaxy Note, with broadly similar specs in other respects. Neither pricing nor availability is yet known.

Finally, the tablet is the MeMo Pad FHD 10, using the same 1.6GHz CloverTrail+ processor coupled to a 1920×1200 10-inch screen and a 25Wh battery that claims to offer a 10-hour battery-life. It’ll be available in 32Gb and 64Gb versions, with a choice of dark blue or white.

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