A prototype from ECS shows off the potential of phone powered tablet devices, first showcased by the Asus Padfone.
What ECS have done is take the Padfone idea and say “well, I want one of those for my iPhone”. And that’s exactly what they have done – made a tablet device with a smartphone dock, and in this instance they have got an iPhone 4 hooked up to it.
The ECS prototype sends what is showing on the iPhone 4 display to its 9.7-inch touch screen display via HDMI. The tablet dock also comes with an SD card slot, two USB ports and a front-facing camera.
Taking the retina risplay of the iPhone 4 and outputting that to a larger screen meant adding black borders due to the different screen ratios, and the battery life won’t even start to compare to the iPad 2’s battery life, but ECS is fully planning to put the device into production.
The main selling point with this smartphone-hijacking tablet is that ECS states it will work with other operating systems too, including Windows Phone 7 and Android.
It also predicts that the docking tablet will handle future iOS releases and iPhone 5. In theory that means you could buy one tablet and have a multiple OS tablet device.
$200 is a guestimation at the price, will it be worth it or is this a non starter? We will just have to wait and see.