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By 6 September 2011 | Categories: news

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There have been a number of interesting developments emerging from IFA over the past several days. It seems though that hybrid devices made a particularly strong showing, such as the hybrid smartphone and tablet, the Galaxy Note. Additionally and no less notably, Korean Telecom unveiled its all-in-one wonder, the KT SpiderPad, which transforms from smartphone, to tablet, to gaming system, to notebook computer, using a range of accessories.   

The core of the SpiderPad is an Android Gingerbread 4.5” smartphone, which boasts a 1.5 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB of memory, 16 GB of internal storage, a screen resolution of 1080 x 800, and both microUSB and microHDMI. The smartphone can work on its own, and, with a small adapter, will accept typical USB peripherals, including a mouse and keyboard and external hard drive.  

However, where the KT SpiderPad becomes really interesting is that it can also be docked into three shells – a notebook shell which offers a larger screen and keyboard and its own battery, a tablet shell which adds a 10.1" touchscreen to the smartphone’s specifications, and a portable gaming console shell which adds familiar PSP-like controls to either side of the smartphone screen. In all cases, the smartphone specs then serve as the base specifications for the notebook, tablet and gaming extension. None of the shells (notebook, tablet and gaming console) work without the smartphone docked into them. 

The portable gaming console shell adds game controls to both sides of the smartphone

The KT SpiderPad is the third convertible type mobile solution we’ve seen over the past month, including Motorola’s Atrix and Asus’ impressive EEE Pad Slider, which ably answered the question, why choose between a netbook and a tablet when you can have both in one? Korean Telecom seems to be following this same line of thought.

The device will be launched in Japan at the end of the year, and international release details are expected at the beginning of 2012.  

In recent news, also at the IFA show, Toshiba unveiled the world’s thinnest 13.3” notebook.

 

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