BackAsus Fonepad 7 | The seven-inch phone
The Asus' Fonepad 7 is too big to use and an average tablet, but it's still an excellent phone
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With phones getting bigger and bigger, the line between them and tablets has been getting thinner and thinner, and the 5-inch Galaxy Note, once considered too big to even imagine, is in fact on the smaller side of the norm these days.
So it was only a matter of time before people started to ask, why do I need a tablet and a phone? A 7-inch tablet is much more portable than the full-sized iPad, and the screen size is big enough for most people. And apparently, it’s not so big that people won’t want to use it to make calls.
At least that’s the thinking behind the Fonepad 7 launched by Asus at a price of ₹ 17,499. Using a tablet to make calls is still awkward, but the fact is that getting the same performance from a phone requires you to spend at least around ₹ 5,000 more. If you use your phone for calls only rarely, then it starts sounding like a pretty good deal, right?
The Intel CPU-based Fonepad 7 is a sleek-looking, 7-inch Android tablet with stereo speakers along the front panel, which makes it a pretty nice media player. There’s a microSD card slot, and a microSIM slot for calls; the microphone is fairly sensitive, so you don’t need to angle the tablet awkwardly to speak.
The screen is running at 1,280x800 pixels; today, you get smaller phones running at a higher resolution, but this is actually more than sufficient for the most part. The screen quality is pretty good as well, but the highlight is the power at hand.
The Fonepad 7 has a dual-core, 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processor, and on paper that sounds middling compared with many other devices in the same price range. The fact, however, is that multitasking and daily use was a breeze. It’s not a powerhouse which will run the very latest games without any issue whatsoever.... But it’s definitely not underpowered either.
The battery lasted about a full day of use, which is essential considering you will be using this as both a tablet and a phone.
Asus has also included a number of very useful tools on the tablet—the Power Saver app is essential, while AudioWizard lets you quickly change audio presets for gaming, watching movies or listening to music. A video-setting app called Splendid lets you adjust the colour temperature of the display, along with brightness, hue and saturation levels. You can also launch a reading mode which changes the colour balance and enhances text. The cool part is that you can select a list of apps for which this mode is automatically applied, so whenever you launch the Kindle app, for example, it will automatically change the display settings, and once you exit the app, things return to normal, so your Web browsing, or gaming, isn’t affected.
These little touches make the Fonepad 7 more appealing, but at the end of the day, you can get similar tablets for less. You might have to compromise a little on design, and at times on display, but the performance is likely to be similar.
On the other hand, using it as a phone is highly awkward, and, let’s face it, embarrassing. If you don’t think so, then it’s a pretty good deal—instead of spending around 30,000-40,000 on a phone and a tablet, you just need a single device, which is powerful enough, and whose battery lasts long enough, that it will be sufficient for just about any role. But it’s a pretty big stumbling block.
The Asus Fonepad 7 is available for ₹ 17,499 online and in retail stores.
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