It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a phone? The simple answer, it’s neither. Asus wants to introduce another innovative product and try to sneak up the phone market that it had failed so many times in the past.

The product is called padFone and it’s a phone that can be plugged inside a specifically designed tablet and it even comes with a keyboard dock, similar to one that you’ve seen with Transformer Prime. This phone is features a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED qHD 960x540 display with scratch resistant glass.

It is nicely designed and it comes with Android 4.0 in vanilla flavor as far as one can tell from this video. It packs a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 1.5GHz processor, but it uses the A version, sans LTE. The tablet resolution is WXGA 1280x800 powered by TFT with Capacitive Multi touch panelScratch Resistant Corning Gorilla Glass with HCLR Film but it is a 10.1 tablet nicely designed but not that thin either.  

The camera on the phone / tablet is 8MP five element lens with f2.2 aperture, quite standard for high-end phones today. The video shows a quite innovative Stylus that acts as a headset in someone calls you while your phone is in your tablet’s belly. This is quite a nice feature, but it will look quite ridiculous when you answer your call on a pen, but not more ridiculous than people with Bluetooth headsets around the world.

The PadFone boasts up to 63 hours of extended talk time with the PadFone Station, and up to 102 hours with the Station Dock keyboard attachment. This is the company’s official claim. The video states that the phone has 16 hours battery life and the small disclaimer at the top of the screen reveals the real truth.

The phone can last 16 hours in 2G network and the pad phone station (tablet) can extend talk time to 63 hours and lastly the keyboard dock gets the 2G talk with to 103 hours. The complete disclaimer goes like this “Talk time is based on 2G network use with the PadFone station and Station dock acting as charger only. Actual performance may vary depending on application, usage, environment and other factors.”

This means you can get 103 hours with the phone plugged in tablet (padFone station), and tablet plugged in the Station dock (keyboard), but you could not be able to use the tablet while talking, or keyboard as it would significantly affect the battery life numbers.

Of course in order to have the tablet feature, the phone must be in the PadFone station as you cannot use it as phone and tablet at the same time. Most importantly, who uses 2G on a 3G capable phone today?

Enough talk, you can see the interesting concept in action in the video after the break.