Asus PadFone X review: Like no other

Gallery

Asus PadFone X features a capable gallery app with customizable layout. As expected these days, you can also sync various cloud storage accounts to display images too.

The gallery app

An image editor is present as well. It allows you to make basic alterations to the stored images and includes creative filters a la Instagram.

Viewing and editing a photo

Video player

The default video player from Asus is surprisingly short on capability. It lacks support for either DivX or XviD codecs, so we highly recommend that you turn to the many third-party options that are available in the Google Play Store.

The video player

Playable videos can be accessed directly in the gallery app. The only video file format that the device played smoothly was .MP4.

We can partially explain the lack of rich video codec support in the PadFone X with the specifics of the US market. The latter is dominated by video streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime - both ran on the device with no hiccups.

File manager

The PadFone X features a capable file manager out of the box. It allows you to access both the phone and its microSD card.

The file manager app

The app offers an option to hide the device's system files.

Music player

Google Play Music is the default player of the PadFone X. It gives you the option to upload music onto the Google-branded cloud and stream it on your device via Wi-Fi or mobile data. There's also the nifty option of downloading the content onto the device if you want to have there for connection-less times.

Google Play music

From the Settings key you can get into the equalizer. It can be turned on and off and features several equalizer presets along with a custom user defined one. If you plug in a headset, you can also play around with the Bass boost and 3D effect sliders.

The Now Playing screen uses the song album art and gives you a quick shortcut to the rest of the artist's songs along with the play controls.

The Now Playing interface

While the player is working, the entire lockscreen features the album art and track info for the current song along with dedicated playback controls. The notification area also lets you control the playback via an expandable notification.

Asus has added its own audio customization suite. Dubbed AudioWizard, the app allows you to choose from a six different presets. They include Music Mode, Movie Mode, Gaming Mode, Recording Mode, Speech Mode, and Power Saving.

Asus AudioWizard

Due to the fact that we received a pre-production unit for our review, we didn't test the audio quality of the Asus PadFone X.