Asus has been known to go drastic with its products and it isn't stopping yet. The company's new ZenPad 8 Z380C tablet has interchangeable back plates that don't just let you change how the tablet looks — they add features.
Apparently, one back plate that makes some sense adds an extra battery, giving you a total of 14 hours worth of juice. Another back plate, called the Audio Cover, makes less sense. It adds six — yes, six! — speakers to the back of your tablet. With the audio cover snapped on, you'll get DTS-HD 5.1 surround sound, supposedly.
Unfortunately, Asus hasn't provided any photos of this thing. If you're looking for something a bit more normal, you can also just swap different colored backs onto the tablet. There will even be leather options like the LG G4.
As for the specifications, the Z380C has an 8-inch, 1200 x 800 IPS display, 1 or 2GB of RAM, and it'll come in 8GB and 16GB varieties. What this is then, essentially, is an affordable tablet — in fact, it'll be one of the first to use Intel's super-low-cost Atom X3 SoFIA.
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If you're looking for something a bit nicer, Asus has announced another ZenPad 8, called the Z580CA, with a high-resolution, 2048 x 1536 display. That means the 8-inch Android tablet has a 4:3 screen just like the iPad mini.
Asus is also joining the selfie craze with a new smartphone, aptly called the ZenFone Selfie. Just like HTC's competing Desire Eye, both the front and rear cameras have 13-megapixel sensors, the largest ever for a front-facing camera. The 5.5-inch Android phone has a wide-angle camera on the front with an f/2.2 lens — the same as the iPhone 6. The rear camera has a rather sizable 1/3.2 sensor (again, comparable to the latest iPhone), laser autofocus, and an f/2.0 aperture. Inside, the ZenFone Selfie is powered by the octa-core, Snapdragon 615 processor.
Like the other devices, there are no prices given for the ZenPhone Selfie either.
