Before the ASUS PadFone came along I have to admit that I’ve seen their idea in several other concepts, including one from HTC and some modular units that involved phone and tablets. However, it was ASUS that put the concept into practice. Now Toshiba is apparently also preparing a combo between a tablet, dock and handset, as shown by one of their recent patents.
Toshiba has been going the Samsung way recently, launching tons of new formats of devices, including a 7, 7.7, 10 and 13 inch model. Patent Bolt discovered a patent application for a communications system that combines the tablet, cordless phone and a docking station. It looks like a corporate/business product, but it would also work as a nice home phone replacement. We don’t have many technical details at the moment, but from the looks of it, this seems like one of those smaller tablets, not a 10 incher.
The “touchpad terminal” included in the sketch could or could not be a tablet, so let’s take this with a grain of salt. That huge cradle will probably host both the handset and tablet and charge them, connect them and pull info from them, perhaps give them some more ports to work with.
