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If you’ve been craving a gigantic phone — or a 7-inch Android tablet that lets you make the odd call, as long as you don’t mind looking silly — Three has a whole bunch of new offers for the mighty Asus Fonepad.
You can plop down £179 for the outsized slate and then pay Three for a monthly data SIM — £5 per month for 250MB, £7.50 for 1GB, or £15 for 10GB. It lets you send texts too, at 10p each, but you could easily use WhatsApp or another messaging service for much less.
You can also bag the bombastic blower-pad for £30 upfront on a 24-month, £12.49 contract (£330 total).
It’s available elsewhere online, including Amazon, for around the £180 mark.
£179 is just £20 more than the equivalent 16GB model of Google’s Nexus 7, which is also built by Asus, but doesn’t have a phone for embarrassing calls.
The Nexus 7 does have a more powerful quad-core chip than the Fonepad’s single-core processor, however. This makes Asus’ effort unsuitable for some of the more action-packed games you can find on Google Play, but it’s totally fine for Web browsing and video.
Another area it lags its phone-free rival is its software. The Nexus 7 is on Android 4.2, and is likely to be bumped up to the brand-new Android 4.3 any day now (its little brother the Nexus 4 is already there). Nevertheless, the Fonepad’s Android 4.1 is perfectly fine.
If you’re pining for a dinky 7-incher, you should note there’s a new Nexus 7 coming in September, starting at £200. It’s pretty much the same — it’ll run Android 4.3 from the get-go and adds a high resolution screen and a 5-megapixel on the back for taking desperately awkward photos. Perhaps of your mate taking a call on their Fonepad.
What do you make of the Fonepad? Too silly to contemplate, or is having a built-in blower in your tablet handy for emergencies? Give me a holler down in the comments, or on our prodigiously proportioned Facebook page.
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