Asus refreshes Android tablets; low-cost MeMo Pad to start at $129
In addition to the budget MeMo Pad HD 7 model, the company has also refreshed its high-end tablet model with the Tegra 4 Transformer Pad Infinity, and added another Fonepad phablet.
TAIPEI -- Asus has refreshed its lineup of Android devices. While not the most powerful, the Asus MeMo Pad HD 7 should end up being the most popular thanks to its attractive starting price of US$129 for the 8GB model. The 16GB version will go for US$149. The tablet will go on sale starting in July.
Specs-wise, the HD 7 sports a 1,280x800 7-inch IPS display and is quite light at just 302g. It will be available in pink, green, blue and white, and is powered by a quad-core ARM Cortex A7 processor.
The MeMo Pad FHD 10 (above) is the 10-inch version with a 1,920 x 1,200-pixel IPS screen. It runs on the Intel Atom Z2560 processor and features wireless options such as Wi-Fi, GPS and GLONASS for navigation and Miracast for wireless display. The FHD will come in 16GB and 32GB versions, and supports memory expansion via a microSD card slot.
At the very high-end is the Transformer Pad Infinity (above). Like the Nexus 10, it sports a 10-inch 2,560x1,600 display, giving it a high PPI value of 300. Inside, it's powered by Nvidia's latest 1.9GHz Tegra 4 processor, which is also supposed to give better graphics performance with a 72-core GeForce GPU.
Its accompanying keyboard dock has a touchpad, USB 3.0 port and an SDXC card reader.
Finally, we have the Asus Fonepad Note FHD 6. Like the 7-inch Fonepad that has just become commercially available in Asia, the Fonepad Note is meant to be used as a mobile phone. Whether the 1-inch screen reduction will make the user look less ridiculous when holding the device up to the face, we'll have to see.
Though smaller, at 1,920x1,080 pixels, its display has a higher resolution than the original Fonepad. The Note FHD 6 has a stylus slot and comes with Asus' software that takes advantage of that. These will likely be similar in function to those found in the Samsung Galaxy Note phablet series.
The Fonepad Note FHD 6 has other midrange specs such as HSPA rather than LTE and an Atom Z2560 processor. Price and availability have yet to be announced.