Asus FonePad is a tiny tablet, supersize smartphone (pictures)

BARCELONA, Spain--Meet the 7-inch FonePad. It's from the company that built the Nexus 7, and in design terms, it's very similar.

The sides are looking minimal, but the tablet has a classy design, especially considering it only costs £179, or $249. There's no word yet on a U.S. release, though.

The tablet is slim enough, and feels light. It's portable, but would you really want to use it as a phone?

The back has a metallic coating that feels rather luxurious. There's no rear-facing camera, though.

Asus is promising a microSD card slot, to bump up the 16GB of built-in storage.

This device will be familiar to anyone who's used Android before. Using it as a phone, however, will take a little courage.

It's running Android 4.1, which sadly isn't the latest version. If you want cutting-edge Android, you'll be better off with a Nexus device.

An Intel Atom processor resides inside. Will it top the quad-core Tegra 3 chip in the Nexus 7? Only time -- and our benchmark tests -- will tell.