Judging from the texture and material of the back cover for Padfone 1, I can imagine the white color will turn irreversibly yellow or even brown over time with use.
I have posted my quick first impressions on TransformerForums.com, here it is:
so far I love it Phone build quality and design are excellent. Tablet not bad either. My previous phone was HTC One X. Here is few things: Apex Launcher and ADW Launcher EX do not work great for me because they don't keep separate screen layouts for phone (Portrait) and tablet (Horizontal) modes. Maybe there is a way I don't know about or just need to ask them to implement support for that. So I'm back to stock launcher and it's not bad. too bad it's wasting 1 row at the top of the screen on the phone. So today I spent most of the time messing with launchers and setting up screens for both: phone and tablet modes. I'm missing Gmail count feature I was used to on Apex Launcher. Guess I need to find a widget for it... Other than that, stock launcher works fine.
Asus custom settings section is a nice touch because it allowed me to remap Recents button, enabled long-press on recents button to open settings menu. Coming from custom ROMs and being used to having recents button remapped to short-press: settings, long-press: recents, its not bad and pleasant surprise.
Some apps like IM Pro offer phone/tablet modes, but so far I was not able to make the app switch automatically, I don't think it's possible as it requires app restart after manually changing mode in settings. I probably need phone and tablet versions installed separately, unless they don't provide that. I think that's why we have an option to kill selected apps on dock/undock, so that when we restart them, they launch in proper mode, I will try that with apps that stay in memory, like IM Pro.
When phone is docked and camera app is lauched, for some reason it's limited to 5Mpix. Strange, but I don't care EDIT: Found solution on Asus website: The default mode of camera is landscape mode (16:9) when insert Padfone 2 into the Station, and the limitation of landscape mode is 5.5M pixels, you can change to portrait mode (4:3), then the camera will provide 13M pixels resolution. (There are 2 switch icon under the camera screen).
Didn't play with many apps yet, but when using stock launcher, GMail, YouTube and Google Play do recognize the phone/tablet mode automatically which is nice.
Oh, I did get popup about new firmware available, I did update on the phone first then once docked, it asked me to update station firmware too, which I did and zero issues with the update process.
I do get H icon when connected to O2 network here in Ireland so that's good, I was afraid it wouldn't work for some reason.
One little issue I have is with my Asus RT-N56U dual-band router, none of my 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks are visible, so I need to play with settings. Both networks are visible and accessible from HTC One X. Edit: Got 2.4GHz network working by removing spaces from network name. Still didn't manage to connect to 5GHz, it's not visible to the phone. Edit2: 5GHz works on channel 52 and above.
Not really sure, definitely not worse. On One X I have been using Volume Booster to get louder in-call volume, worked great. I'll probably know better later in few days after more use, but so far no complaints. Not really concerned as can start using Volume Booster again if needed. External loudspeaker seem good. It's strange, but when watching YouTube on the phone, even that speaker is on the back of the phone, it does sound like the speaker was in front of me as if the sound was coming from the display (unlike on HTC One X) and that was very nice, I did not have to put my hand behind the phone to bounce sound waves back in my direction. Enabling Movie mode in Audio Wizard made the sound much louder and words were even easier to understand. It sounds "crisp" if you know what I mean, it's like tiny yet Hi-Fi speaker.
Just took some photos,of the usb wire, really weird stuff here, normal micro usb doesn't go all in..also padfone station can only be charged with the asus ac adapter, emphasis on ONLY
Edit: took the photos from the padfone itself to show off the awesome camera but this site doesnt like mobile browsers uploading piccies..