Asus PadFone Merges Smartphone With A Tablet

When you look at what’s hot and what’s not in today’s mobile computing market, you’d probably come to the conclusion that smartphones and tablets are on the hot side of things. Tablets mainly thanks to Apple’s iPad, smartphones because if the iPhone and Android. Windows Phone will surely snag a bit of market share as well in the coming years away from the two heavyweights thanks to Microsoft’s cooperation with Finnish company Nokia.

When you look at the devices that are offered to you, you do not really see a lot of uniqueness. Sure, you get a different version of iOS or Android with your tablet or phone, but feature-wise, they do not really differ that much from each other anymore.

Asus’ PadFone tries to change that by merging a smartphone with a tablet. How does it work? The base unit is the phone running an Android 4.0 operating system. You can use that phone like any other Android phone that you may have worked with in the past. Install apps, take pictures, make and receive calls, listen to music, and all that other fancy stuff that people do nowadays with their phones.

When you need more screen estate, you can insert the phone into the docking station to use the station’s bigger screen instead. That’s useful in class or during presentations for instance, or anywhere else where you need access to a bigger screen. The screen is powered by the phone, and all of your phone’s data becomes available on that screen as well.

This is a fairly interesting option, at least for some users who like to be more flexible in this regard, especially since it ships with a stylus and an optional full-qwerty keyboard dock for those who’d like more writing comfort.

The best way to see how this works in reality is to watch this video. Keep in mind that it is a commercial by Asus. It is still great for seeing how the mechanics works.

The station offers a 10.1 inches multi-touch display that is good for a 1280×800 WXGA resolution. It packs its own battery, and a 1.3 MP camera on the front. Since it is using the phone’s computing power and features, it can be used for pretty much the same things that you use your phone for.

A core benefit of merging the Padfone with its station is an increase in battery. According to Asus, battery life may be five times as much for the phone when it is in the station, and nine times as much if the keyboard dock is also connected. The gain depends on a number of factors, and it is likely that the majority of users will see a smaller gain.

Here is a hands on video

I cannot really say how well it works as I did not have the chance to play around with the device. The idea sounds interesting though, and if Asus gets the price right, it can certainly become a popular device on today’s saturated market.

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Photoshop Touch Gives You Core Photoshop Features for Your iPad or Android Tablet

If you’re a Photoshop fan and an iPad owner, you’re in luck. You can now edit and share their images through the new iPad Adobe Photoshop Touch app. The app is part of the Adobe Touch Apps family, a group of 6 apps inspired by Creative Suite® software made especially for tablet use. Up until now, however, the apps have only been available for Android tablets. Here’s a rundown of the new iOS version.

First off, you should know that you need a second generation iPad (sorry, iPad 1 users!) and at least iOS5 to run Adobe Photoshop Touch. Now that that’s out of the way– Photoshop Touch for iPad allows you to import images from your iPad native photo albums, your Adobe Creative Cloud account, Google Image Search and your Facebook albums. Once your images are in the app, you can combine them into layers and edit them with popular Photoshop features such as selection tools, adjustments and filters.

Other notable tablet-optimized features include the Scribble Selection and Refine Edge tools, which let you use your fingers to select part of an image to extract from its background, and the camera fill feature which allows you to capture an image with your iPad camera and use it fill in part of a layer.

When you’re done touching up your image, you can save it to your camera roll or upload it to Facebook, Email, or your free Adobe Creative Cloud account. If you save your work to Adobe Creative Cloud, you can retrieve and continue to edit an image (with the layers intact!) from Photoshop CS5 on your desktop.

Adobe Photoshop Touch is available in the iTunes App Store (and the Android Market) for $9.99, but if you’d like a chance to get it for free, we have one $10 iTunes gift card to give away. Just comment on this post before 11:00 P.M. EST today and we’ll pick one person at random to receive a free $10 iTunes card!

Sarah Feng is a sophomore at NYU, where she is double majoring in Economics and Journalism and minoring in Computer Science. She came to New York from her hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee. Her interests include figure-skating, playing the piano, eating, working out, and trying new apps on her Macbook Pro. Her favorite color is pink, her favorite food is ice cream and favorite teen drama is a tie between Gossip Girl and The O.C. Aside from writing on Hackcollege, you can also find her on twitter and facebook.