The Asus Padfone, the interesting new device which is an Asus smartphone that turns into a tablet, has begun to make its way to U.S. retailers.

The Asus Padfone was unveiled by Asus about four months ago at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

One U.S. retailer, Negri Electronics, now has a live listing for the Asus Padfone. It’s price is stated as $859.50 for the 16GB version and is currently showing a status of “Back Order”. The 32GB version of the Asus Padfone is being sold at $959.50 and the 64GB version is at $1,059.50. Negri is selling the brown version of the device.

The Asus Padfone is essentially a smartphone which can become a tablet via a dock (the tablet shell) in which you insert the smartphone into.

The smartphone is equipped with a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen in a body that measures 128 x 65.4 x 9.2 mm and weighs 129 g.

It is equipped with 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of internal memory which can be supplemented a microSD card (up to 32GB in storage). It is equipped with 1GB of RAM.

It features an 8MP rear camera which has autofocus and a LED flash. This camera also serves as the camera of the tablet once the Asus Padfone is docked inside its tablet shell. This is made possible by a hole at the back of the tablet for the camera.

The smartphone (and by extension the tablet) runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor clocked 1.5GHz. It’s a dual-core processor with Krait cores. Graphics processing is handled by an Adreno 225 graphics processing unit.

It has to be noted that the tablet shell cannot run by itself. It has to have the smartphone inside it to run as it has no processor, RAM and onboard memory.

However, what it does provide is a 10.1-inch screen and an extra battery to power both the devices. This means that the tablet shell of the Asus Padfone can charge the smartphone inside it if the smartphone is low on battery.

Meanwhile, another retailer Expansys has also put up a sign-up page for those interested in preordering the Asus Padfone. It lists the Asus Padfone + Station as the product but doesn’t list anything more specific than that. Price of the device from the retailer has also not been revealed.

Images from sam_churchill & Masaru Kamikura on Flickr (CC)

About Solon Harmony Dolor

A passion for technology and journalism makes this upcoming writer very interested in social media and technology news. Fresh from finishing an English and Journalism degree from the University of the Philippines Diliman, he aims to bring interesting news to our readers .