The PadFone Station Dock's aluminum hinge and tablet release latch appear to be identical to the one on the TF101 dock. However, we had to really force our PadFone Station into the latter to just about get a connection (as pictured above), so it's safe to say that the two are officially incompatible. In other words: don't do this at home, kids. While it's disappointing that we're not allowed to re-use the older dock here (be it for the sake of saving money, reducing waste or purely mixing-and-matching patterns), ASUS pointed out that the heavier PadFone tablet does require a stronger hinge.

Docking the PadFone

Inserting the phone into the PadFone Station is as simple as releasing the station's hinged cover using the latch up top. Then slide the phone into the bay (which has a slick plastic strip on both "walls" to smooth the action) until you feel a soft click akin to that of plugging in a micro-USB cable. Within just over a second after the insertion (regardless of whether the cover is still open), the tablet comes to life with the sweet Ice Cream Sandwich tablet interface. When you're done, just release the cover and push it down to about 90 degrees in order to trigger the phone release mechanism, which is just two little plastic probes that stick out to push up the phone. In fact, you can even just force-pull the phone out by anchoring your thumb on the screen and then gripping the phone with the tips of your fingers -- this is, ahem, handy for when you want to extract the phone while keeping the tablet in your bag.

Obviously, the official way is easier, and it really isn't as scary as it sounds as the cover's hinge is pretty strong. Before long we had mastered a single-handed technique: unlatch the cover with one hand (usually just with an index finger), then slide the hand down to push the cover with the middle finger, and then grab the undocked phone out. Pro tip: do this slowly so people around you can watch with awe. Second pro tip: our single-handed technique doesn't work well when the docked PadFone Station is tilted at the maximum angle, as the slippery feet below the keyboard's hinge are just asking for trouble when you try this trick.

Performance

ASUS PadFone (phone mode) HTC One S ASUS PadFone (docked) ASUS Transformer Prime Quadrant (v2) 5,354 5,053 5,318 4,137 Vellamo 2,521 2,452 2,445 1,418 AnTuTu 7,042 7,067 6,886 10,269 SunSpider 0.9.1 (ms) 1,611 1,742 1,623 1,861 GLBenchmark Egypt Offscreen (fps) 55 57 55 68 CF-Bench 9,571 9,547 9,456 11,861

Like the HTC One XL (or simply the One X on AT&T) and One S, the slick PadFone takes advantage of Qualcomm Snapdragon S4's Krait, which is technically a more capable architecture than the Tegra 3's Cortex-A9. That said, after thoroughly comparing the two SoCs, AnandTech concluded that each has its own advantage, and it really depends on how heavily threaded the apps are -- something that the legendary site doubts would favor phones with quad-core Tegra 3 any time soon. Yet the PadFone is also a tablet (effectively making it the first commercially available Snapdragon S4 tablet) and a netbook. Both form factors are begging for a wider range of applications in order to slowly overtake the role of conventional PCs. At one point we were even certain that ASUS would launch the PadFone with Tegra 3, which would've given it slightly more graphics oomph than the MSM8260A's Adreno 225 engine (the beefier Adreno 320 will have to wait for the MSM8960 Pro). What officially happened with that plan remains a mystery, but if we must guess, it was probably because ASUS wanted a smooth upgrade path to the PadFone LTE that was also announced at MWC; while Tegra with integrated Icera LTE won't materialize until next year. With that considered, and judging by these scores plus our smooth experience, we think this is a damn good decision, especially for an extremely adventurous product that's never been done by others before.

Battery life

Phone Battery Life Tablet Battery Life ASUS PadFone 6:15 ASUS PadFone (tablet mode* / laptop mode*) 9:56 / 17:30 Motorola RAZR Maxx 16:30 ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime (undocked / docked) 10:17 / 16:34 Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G 11:20 ASUS Transformer Pad TF300 (undocked / docked) 8:29 / 12:04 Samsung Stratosphere 10:00 Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 12:01 Samsung Galaxy Note (Int'l) 9:36 Apple iPad 2 10:26 HTC One S (Int'l / T-Mobile) 8:30 / 9:10 Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 9:55 Samsung Galaxy S III 9:02 Apple iPad (2012) 9:52 (HSPA) / 9:37 (LTE) HTC One X (AT&T) 8:55 Apple iPad 9:33 HTC EVO 4G LTE (Sprint) 8:55 Pantech Element 9:00 Samsung Captivate Glide 8:30 Motorola Xoom 2 8:57 Motorola Droid 4 7:15 HP TouchPad 8:33 Prada phone by LG 3.0 7:00 Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet 8:20 Huawei Ascend P1 6:40 Lenovo IdeaPad K1 8:20 Galaxy Nexus (Verizon) 6:15 Motorola Xoom 8:20 HTC One X 6:00 Acer Iconia Tab A200 8:16 Xiaomi Phone 5:40 Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus 8:09 Meizu MX 5:30 Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 8:00 LG Viper 4G LTE 4:49 Amazon Kindle Fire 7:42 Panasonic Eluga 4:30 Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 7:38

*Battery life of tablet mode and laptop mode include phone-only time after battery is depleted on the PadFone Station. The PadFone Station does not operate once it runs out of battery.

As you may have seen in our Transformer reviews, it requires a fair amount of patience when grilling these multi-battery devices to test their endurance. So you can imagine the pain -- or joy, depending on how you look at it -- we went through with the whole PadFone package. As mentioned earlier, the phone itself houses a removable 3.7V 1,520mAh battery, and that got us through about six hours and 15 minutes in our standard rundown test (that's with a video looping, a 3G data connection, WiFi enabled but not connected, brightness fixed at 50 percent and some specific background sync settings). Yikes, that's almost three hours short of what we got from the similarly specced HTC One S -- same display panel, same SoC, just with 130mAh more battery juice. We imagine this likely has more to do with the way ASUS set its power management profiles. For this test, we used balanced mode, which still keeps the CPU clocked at 1.5GHz max, but the system processes with both cores less often than it does in performance mode. As for power saving mode, ASUS told us the CPU is capped at a surprisingly high 1.2GHz and the display brightness is set to 90 percent by default -- same as balanced mode (but we changed it back to 50 percent and made sure it was non-outdoor mode for the test, obviously).

Going back to those official real-life figures we obtained a while back, it's interesting to see how ASUS' lab only got about 2.6 hours and 2.1 hours on the phone alone for continuous web browsing over WiFi and 3G, respectively. By comparison, we got around 6.25 hours with our video loop test plus 3G data connection. That's almost three times as much stamina than what ASUS got out of its 3G browsing test! Our money's on the Super AMOLED panel sucking up all the power for the web pages' white backgrounds (again, a drawback that's been cheekily pointed out by LG). It's a good thing, then, that the larger PadFone Station -- naturally the eye-friendlier option for web browsing -- uses an LCD panel instead. Well, not that ASUS has a choice until someone makes an affordable 10-inch OLED panel.

Despite the outcome of the rundown tests from us and ASUS, the PadFone's battery performed very well under our normal usage and easily lasted a full day. We also recall one night when we forgot to plug the phone into a charger before going to bed, but when we woke up about eight hours later it had only drained about 10 percent of battery, presumably mostly due to its WiFi connection. We also tested constantly listening to music from the phone while using its personal hotspot for our laptop (mainly for Twitter, Facebook, typing and the occasional random YouTube clips for giggles), and that lasted for three hours and 50 minutes. Needless to say, you'd get a lot more hotspot time if you utilize the pad and the keyboard dock as well.

Speaking of which, with the same battery rundown test, we got just under 10 hours out of the tablet combo, whereas the laptop combo pumped out 17.5 hours. Coincidentally, neither are far off the official claims for continuous web browsing over WiFi (and they're respectively about one hours and three hours more than ASUS' 3G figures). However, there is a caveat with these numbers: the PadFone Station pad fails to operate once it runs out of its own battery, so the aforementioned figures actually include the duration of the phone running on its own using its remaining battery juice. This is also why, by default, you're given the intelligent charging mode, so that when the keyboard dock still has battery juice, it keeps the PadFone at no less than 90 percent battery level, with the pad's battery level staying pretty much untouched if full. However, if the pad's battery is significantly lower than the keyboard's, then the latter will share the love with the former as well. When the keyboard's battery is exhausted, the system will lower the minimum threshold of the phone's battery level so that the pad can operate longer. On the contrary, the charging pack mode simply prioritizes all the battery power to the phone, but again starting with the keyboard dock's battery.

For those interested, here's a brief breakdown of what we got from the intelligent charging mode corresponding to the above figures. In our tablet combo the PadFone Station gave up at about eight hours and 45 minutes into the 10-hour rundown test, leaving the phone with 28 percent battery left. In our laptop combo the PadFone Station died at about 14 hours into the 17.5-hour test, but somehow the phone had 55 percent battery left. In the above tablet mode rundown chart, despite the lack of samples in the early hours, you can still see how the intelligent mode's bias towards the phone keeps it alive for a wee bit longer after the PadFone Station gives up.

Later on we inserted our almost-depleted phone into a fully charged PadFone Station, and about three hours later the phone went from 11 percent to 94 percent, with the pad at 90 percent. This is presented by the chart above.

Camera

The PadFone's 8-megapixel camera does a solid job all around.

The PadFone's 8-megapixel (3264 x 2448, 4:3) f/2.2 camera does a solid job all around, offering good color reproduction in most cases and can easily handle macro shots, while night shots depend on the environment. For instance, streets with some lit signs look great in our photos, though we still needed several tries in order to get rid of the blurriness or find the right focus. Most of the time we just ended up manually boosting the ISO for the sake of speed and steadiness, or used the night scene mode to extend the exposure time (as long as we had somewhere to lean our phone against). It's also safe to say that the less dense PenTile subpixel layout made it a tad more difficult to check the pictures' sharpness, so be sure to double check your important shots in the gallery. Another hitch is that when taking pictures with a white, cloudy sky in the backdrop, we often had to manually increase the exposure level rather than tapping the appropriate focus area to lock our desired exposure and focus point -- 'tis a widespread issue amongst Android devices. We've tried the backlight scene mode as well, but it only added a light shade of white over the image instead of improving it. We collected the good shots in our extensive gallery below, so enjoy.