There's someone on this planet for whom this hunk of a phone is intended. That someone is definitely not me. If I had a Lamborghini, it would be parked out front or busy gliding me across to some rendezvous — it wouldn’t be the heavyweight gold and leather smartphone I hold in my hands right now. For a start, it’s really meant for men and to me looks entirely Mafioso. Like it could be made of a chunk of car, for that matter. It arrived in a box bigger than that of a laptop — a box inside a box inside a box, and then finally five inches of Lamborghini 88 Tauri encased in satin. While the piece sent to me is black leather (real) and steel with gold plating, there are a few other models without the gold. A blue leather one, in fact, looks quite trendy. I’d probably have opted for one of the non-gold models unless I was an Arab sheikh, which it seems I’m not and which is quite conceivably the reason I don’t have the $6000 to pay for it — approximately Rs 3.75 lakh.
The Tonino Lamborghini Tauri is other than the styling, a regular Android phone. The specs are nothing to complain about. In fact, there’s a 2.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor. There’s 3 whole GB of RAM, a full HD screen, and a big fat battery of 3,500mAh.That should be enough for the phone’s owner to talk a long, long time no matter which of his two lives he’s leading — it’s a dual SIM. It’s running on Android 4.4.4. The primary camera is a 20MP and the front 8MP and these are average, with the primary camera being a little off-colour in low light. It has pretty nice sound and call quality as that’s not an area that an owner would have compromised on.
The sides of the phone are skirted with the steel-gold and very sturdy flaps open out to give you access to all the slots and ports including a micro-SD card aperture. This chunk of luxury is not something you’ll put in a pocket — it’s too heavy — but carry proudly in your hand. If you’re bold, open-minded, daring and successful, or so says the Lamborghini marketing for this device. There’s a bit of Lamborghini car in this phone as well. That would be the shatter-proof scratch-proof glass that makes up its screen.
There are only 1947 of these phones in the world.
Asus Padfone MiniWhat’s a phone doing riding piggyback on a tablet? Well, being inventive, of course. Asus, the company that has come up with the Padfone Mini, has been playing with this idea for a long time coming up with all manner of hybrids and exploring what exact combo could be an ideal one for different groups of people. Until now, these hybrids have been on the expensive side. But the Padfone Mini is Rs 15,999 and worth considering if you want two products almost for the price of one, working together in a totally unusual way. But there are compromises and sacrifices…
The phone part of this configuration is a little 4-inch Android that really looks quite nice. It has some metallic accents that make it look smart. You can carry it by itself, but it’s meant to fit into the back of the tablet by being slid in to click into place. The tablet is dominated by the big deep slot for the phone. Other than that, the back is soft plastic and the entire 8-inch tablet doesn’t have any styling — on the front, it’s a regular Android tab.
Both devices are actually very middling in terms of all specs and features, with the fact that they fit into each other being the one big thing that makes them different. The displays are 480x800 and 800x1280. They’re average — workable with no specific annoyances, but not remarkable. The processor is a 1.6GHz dual-core Intel Atom Z2560. Now of course we’re used to octa-core, so one can’t help but find this wanting. There’s just 1GB of RAM. The cameras are 8MP and 1.9MP. Performance too is average and you won’t comfortably be able to do something power intensive. You can pair the two pieces up though and even take calls via the tablet, use some of the phone’s apps on it, and use the same screen layout.
The more serious thing however, is to think of just why you would want to hitch a 4-inch phone to an 8-inch tablet. There are affordable phones that are in the range of 6 inches, so one may as well get one of those and be able to call as well as use a big screen. It’s difficult to think of what exact task would need the pair of devices connected to each other while cutting back on hardware specifications.
What’s more, while the phone is comfortable to hold, being that small, the tablet isn’t that ergonomically friendly because of the slot at the back. That has somewhat prominent edges that, despite giving you a way of gripping the tablet, are hard and not comfortable on the fingers. Perhaps there needed to be much more of a difference in size between the two components to warrant a pairing of the two.
(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 23-03-2015)
