Asus shows us how to turn a smartphone into a 10-inch tablet

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Brad McCarty

A music and tech junkie who calls Nashville home, Brad is the Director TNW Academy. You can follow him on Twitter @BradMcCarty. (show all) A music and tech junkie who calls Nashville home, Brad is the Director TNW Academy. You can follow him on Twitter @BradMcCarty.

We’ve seen similar offerings from Motorola lately in the Atrix 4G, but this convergence of phone and tablet is the first of its kind. Asus has just demonstrated a device that it’s (somewhat unfortunately) calling the Padfone at Computex in Taipei.

The idea is that you take a phone, slide it into a tablet-formed “dock” and then continue to use the same device but just in a different function. Once docked, you’ll get the larger screen, some additional battery power and I/O ports but we don’t know any of the fine-point details just yet.

So your phone then drives a tablet, giving it 3G capability and keeping you from having to synchronize data or use cloud services to keep information accessible. Interesting.

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There’s no word yet about pricing, as the device is more proof of concept than retail-ready. Asus says that the size might change, as well as nearly every other detail. Rest assured though, we’ll be keeping our eyes on this one.