Review Part 2 - Personal experiences

Personal experience

This is the section which I find that some reviews lack: the personal hands-on experience on how the phone is, feels, works, performs in both everyday use and in specific tasks.

I must say I was impressed with the product from the moment I turned it on which is also why I decided to get a new SIM for it so that I could promote it to my main phone for the time being. I much prefer the Android experience that Asus provides compared to Touchwiz. Before trying the stock Android, I didn’t understand all the criticism of the Touchwiz UI, but now I do. It’s not that Touchwiz is bad – in fact not at all. However stock Android in its current form is superior in so many ways.

There was however one thing I had to get used to: the touch buttons. I was used to the setup of the Galaxy S2 which from left to right has: Menu, physical Home, Back. The Padfone 2 has: Back, Home, Window.

I know the word Window is quite a generic description, but basically goes into the app switching window allowing you to switch between active apps. It also takes screenshots when held down for 2 seconds – an invaluable quick shortcut as a reviewer. Although I do accidentally take screenshots when I get distracted while wanting to open the app manager.

Anyway, as I was saying, it took a while to get used to the button layout. Often I would press Back when I wanted to use the (context) menu which on the Asus is integrated in the UI instead of a button. And when wanting to press Back I would get into the app manager. This is a thing of the past however. After a week or so, I had adjusted which is funny because when I turned on my Galaxy S2 a couple of days ago, I did the same thing with pressing the wrong buttons despite the fact that I’ve owned the phone for over a year.

But to stay on topic of the buttons. I do find that they sometimes can be slightly unresponsive. I’m not sure if it’s to do with the power management. Currently they’re set to turn off after 10 seconds of inactivity. I would have liked a 30, 60 or even a 120 second option. The options available are 2 or 10 seconds as well as always on or off. Arguably I could just set it to always on since they do of course turn off when the screen is locked but as any smartphone user is aware of; you want to get as much battery life out of your phone as possible.

It’s hard to criticize the rest of the phone other than the lack of the SD card option. Sometimes the phone does feel too large when used one-handed. My hand isn’t small, but not that large either, so it’s useable with a little effort. Two-handed use is perfect though, but I guess that’s the price of having a phone with a large display such as the Asus PadFone 2. It’s hard to go back to a smaller phone though. After getting used to the PadFone, my Galaxy S2 feels puny in comparison and it is a 4.3” display. I can’t imagine how humongous the 5.5” inch phones must feel and there’s a lot of them in production at the moment. I’d say that for me, 5” is probably the highest I’d go.

Before using the PadFone 2, I considered tablets an expensive toy. I mean a smartphone fits in your pocket, so if you want a bigger screen you can always bring a small laptop which has a full-fledged operating system as well as a large screen and a physical keyboard. That opinion has changed.
I’ve found that the tablet mode has been a mix of both worlds. It’s portable and lightweight with a big screen. I find that a laptop is too much and too awkward to use while in the train or sitting in a restaurant. That’s where a tablet comes in. It’s a good form factor and easy to hold and vastly improves web browsing compared to a phone - even a phone as sizeable as the PadFone. It’s also much easier to lie in bed with a tablet than a laptop when you want to watch a show on Netflix before going to bed.

It’s been hard to properly test the battery life. Testing the battery life would require me to stop using the PadFone, but I’ve grown quite attached to it and use it more than my laptop. I watch my shows on the tablet instead of my laptop partly because of the IPS display. My laptop’s display only has a few things going for it compared to the PadFone station. It has a 1600x900 matte display – that’s about it. Otherwise it’s a less-than-average TN panel which can’t compare to an IPS display. The viewing experience is simply much better despite the glossy display on the Pad Station – cranking up the display brightness compensates for the mirror effect caused by the glossy finish for the most part.

Other than watching movies and TV shows, I also browse the web a lot on it. It’s mostly great, but I find that the Android browser has a tendency to crash when opening too many tabs, even if you close them again. I’m not sure if it’s a memory leak or a cache feature gone haywire, but if I browse a page and open a few tabs, close them, open a few more and close them - repeating this one too many times will make the browser crash. I haven’t tested it on other browsers such as Chrome or Firefox but the stock browser doesn’t play nice with prolonged browsing like that.

I also mentioned the ASUS Studio app which is used for picture and video. It does its job but as I previously mentioned, it’s not as good as other players found on the Google Play store. I stopped using it because it would at times freeze the image during playback but the audio would still play and the menus were still responsive as well. So it seems like a codecs issue. It was sometimes fixable by fast-forwarding or rewinding but not always, so it became quite the nuisance after a while hence I switched video player.

The only complaint of the phone I have left has nothing to do with the actual phone itself. It’s with the supplied USB cable. It’s incredibly short which is fine for connecting the phone to a laptop, but it’s too short when you use the AC adapter and want to charge it from the wall socket or if you have a desktop PC you want to connect it to. I measured the cable to be about 90 cm. I would have liked the cable to be 2 meters. That’s more than most chargers I believe but it makes the cable more versatile. So far I’ve mostly charged the phone through my laptop or my standard micro USB charger which measures about 155 cm. While both the phone and the Pad Station fit a micro USB charger, it’s not perfect. Due to the custom solution, a micro USB plug can be wiggled out without holding the device in the other hand and if pressed from the side, it will be “half” unplugged meaning it will stop charging. I've also noticed that sometimes either the phone, tablet or both stop charging randomly, especially when using micro-USB cable. It's usually fixed by unplugging and plugging it back in. Just a tiny little nuisance I've discovered in my first two weeks with the phone.

Picture of the half unplugged state mentioned

The home screen is very nice looking and I like the ASUS clock/weather widget which you can see on the right. I like how Asus managed to fit 5 apps at the bottom.. On the left you can see the charger widget. When in tablet mode, it includes the battery for both the phone and the tablet. 

To the left is the app menu. As you can see there’s some dedicated tabs in addition to the standard apps. There’s a Pad Only section for apps marked as pad/tablet only and there’s a widgets section for all the widgets including the ones made my Asus.

The notification bar on the PadFone is fantastic. It contains a surprisingly large amount of info and fits many options that’s easily accessible. It gives quick access to toggling wifi, Bluetooth and mobile data as well as screen brightness. Not only that, it provides access to the phone settings, wifi settings and lots of other things just by scrolling the middle section to the right. Asus did a great job with this. As you can see there’s also a Smart Saving mode which is a function made by Asus to reduce power consumption. How well it works is something I've yet to discover.