Didn’t ASUS just launched the PadFone Mini in Taiwan recently? Well, that is true indeed. However, the PadFone Mini that the company announced at its CES 2014 press conference earlier today is slightly different from the one that the company released in its home country.
To start off, the smartphone unit of the global PadFone Mini model has a 4-inch 800×480 IPS display while the Taiwanese variant features a 4.3-inch 960×540 IPS display instead. Additionally, the global model runs on 1.6 GHz Intel Atom Z2560 dual-core processor instead of the 1.4 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 quad-core processor that appears on the PadFone Mini 4.3 variant.
In terms of memory, both variants are equipped with 1GB of LPDDR2 RAM but the global model has smaller internal storage at 8 GB while the 4.3-inch version has 16GB. While both of them comes standard with Android 4.3, ASUS has equipped the new global variant with the company’s in-house ZenUI that is also used on the new ASUS ZenFone series but not for PadFone Mini 4.3.
Meanwhile, the PadFone Station for both variants do have similar 7-inch 1280×800 IPS display. They also have the same 8-megapixels BSI camera sensor from Sony on their rear camera which is paired together with f/2.0 5-elements lens and ASUS own PixelMaster technology. Not to forget, there is also a 2.0-megapixels front-facing camera on both models.
The new ASUS PadFone Mini is scheduled for release throughout the world sometime in the second quarter of 2014 with a starting price tag of USD 249 (RM 818) which is slightly lower than PadFone Mini 4.3’s launch price in Taiwan. Well, let’s see which variant of PadFone Mini that ASUS Malaysia will bring to our market sometime in the near future.
