C'est la trêve de Noël. Aux États-Unis, Apple abandonne ses poursuites à l'encontre de Samsung, du moins pour le Galaxy S3 mini. Ce smartphone n'est pas commercialisé sur le sol américain.

The ASUS PadFone and the Transformer Pad Infinity tablet got a lot of praise lately, especially for the quality of their materials, nifty design and originality. So, why not have ASUS make a cool smartphone? Bob Freking takes on this task and designed the beautiful ASUS ZenPhone, that he calls “the Transformer Infinity Phone”.

As you can see, this model borrows a lot from the ASUS PadFone, the facade and the back reminds me of the Infinity tablet, so it’s a hybrid between them. The ZenPhone uses 32GB of storage, a microSD card slot and a Super IPS+ 4 inch display. At the back there’s an 8 megapixel backside illuminated camera with flash. The device’s chassis involves a brushed metal coating, that’s only 8.5mm thin. Under the hood there’s an overpowered 1.9 GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 quad core processor.

Android 4.0 is the OS of choice, with the option to upgrade to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean in the future. So, if you loved the Transformer Prime/Infinity, now there’s a phone version concept. For 4G units, the Tegra 3 CPU will be swapped with a dual core Snapdragon S4, as customary. I have to say I’d buy such a device in heartbeat, since I prefer metal for the chassis of phones instead of plastic. Do you?

Make what you will of the following devices, but know that they fit in the ASUS IRIS concept mobile device series, showcased at Computex 2011 this week. Taking place in Taipei, the show includes especially tablets and focuses on the latest innovations in the mobile field.

These ASUS concepts are elegant and simplistic in design. I have to notice the precious-looking bezel that some of the handsets and tablets sport and wonder what material that may be. These models seem incredibly thin and their screens look very much like E-ink material, unless there’s some other new technology in the mix.

Tablets that are very thin and sport precious metal edges and finishes in leather sound like a good idea. Maybe we’ll see Vertu producing one fashion tablet like this some day…

We’ve recently come across some pretty interesting tablet designs, among which there’s the Asus Net Fusion, created by Juan Manuel Bustos. This is a device that combines the features of a laptop with those of a tablet and netbook. Destined to reach the hands of students and graphic design professionals this product gets detailed below  (click to enlarge).

The Asus tablet measures 13mm in thickness, it comes with 2 speakers, shortcuts shown on screen and a very interesting and original virtual QWERTY keyboard. There’s also a virtual mouse wheel shown on screen and the specs of the Asus Net Fusion include 2 USB ports, WiFi, LAN, 3G, a webcam and Windows operating system (hopefully Win 7).

The device also seems to support navigational features, as shown in one of the images below. Asus Net Fusion uses a stylus for interaction and drawing, so it’ll probably be loved by design professional. We consider this the perfect alternative to a Wacom tablet. What do you say?

There haven’t been too many concept handsets to gaze at during CES 2010, but one of the impressive devices was the ASUS Waveface Ultra, a bracelet watchphone pictured below. Waveface is in fact a series of concept devices, created by ASUS and including the Waveface Casa TV, the Waveface Light, a touch tablet and the Waveface Ultra watchphone.

ASUS Waveface Ultra is a wearable cellphone concept that can be worn around the wrist, just like a bracelet. This device is a pretty trendy accessory and it uses a flexible OLED display, being also based on gesture control and touch interface.

There’s also a cloud system supposed to work both with the watchphone and the tablet pictured below, that also features a flexible display. All of these devices, even the Casa TV, are able to access documents and all sorts of content via the platform setup by ASUS. A brilliant idea that we’ll hopefully see turned into reality, soon!