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Right on time with all the best ingredients: a powerful and efficient quad-core processor, a powerful graphics engine, a large mobile display, best-in-class camera performance, LTE and a super-slick user experience. And that's just the phone alone!

Having improved on many of the PadFone's shortcomings, the Asus PadFone 2 is a worthwhile upgrade for fans of the original version. ... If having a good camera and the latest OS aren't first on your list of priorities, the PadFone is worth a look.

There's still the feeling that the Asus Padfone is a little niche. It's a nice enough smartphone with competitive performance, but there are a number of compromises you have to live with on the tablet front should you take this hybrid solution.

If the Padfone 2 provided a perfect phone and tablet experience we might be more forgiving of the lack of microSD card slot. However, as it stands, there’s very little to recommend this over practically any other tablet and phone combination at the price.

Although this is a clever, well-designed combination, overall it also feels like a compromise compared with the strengths of two separate gadgets.

The bulkiness of the original model is totally gone and we're still blown away by the combo's new weight. But first, the phone: in our hands, it really just feels like an enlarged version of the original PadFone, especially with the ripple pattern on the back.

The ASUS Padfone 2 is thinner, lighter and faster than the original Padfone and has significantly upgraded internals.