14 DAY TRIAL // Asus has recently refreshed its Padfone series with the sequel of the smartphone/tablet combo device that got released on the market a few months ago.
The Padfone 2 is expected to go on sale in late October, but Asus said that the keyboard dock wouldn’t be available for purchase along with the smartphone.
According to the company, its engineers are still working on the dock, so it will take some time until it goes on sale.
In the same piece of news, GSMArena reports that an Asus representative confirmed that Padone 2 would receive the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update sometime in November.
Although the cited rep did not offer a roadmap for the Jelly Bean release, we expect Asus to make it available for download globally next month, as promised.
Asus Padfone 2 will be shipped with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system out of the box, so those who will be among the first to buy the device will have to wait a few more weeks for the Jelly Bean update.
The phone has been confirmed to go on sale in Taiwan next week, while other countries will get it by the end of the year.
So far, Asus confirmed Padfone 2’s availability in the following countries: Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and U.A.E.
Asus Padfone 2 will reach countries that are not listed above sometime in 2013, but the company has yet to make any official comments on this one.
The smartphone is a consistent improvement from the previous model and comes with a much larger 4.7-inch Super IPS+ LCD capacitive touchscreen display that supports HD (720 x 1280 pixels) resolution.
The Padfone 2 is powered by a 1.5 GHz quad-core Qualcomm processor built on Krait architecture, and packs 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory.