BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 –When Asus first announced the PadFone at Computex 2011, they did so with a level of gleefully cheesy showmanship that set Apple fans sarcastically hailing chairman Jonney Shih as South Korea’s next Steve Jobs. To many Apple fans, the PadFone — a laptop with a tablet inside with a phone inside the tablet — represented the worst of the rest of the industry’s “kitchen sink” approach to beating Cupertino. If we can’t build a phone to beat the iPhone, a tablet to beat the iPad, or an ultraportable to beat the MacBook Air, why not beat one device to beat all three at the same time?

But it’s wrong to dismiss the PadFone just because of cheesy showmanship, or because it’s not likely to topple Apple’s three pillars in one go. We had a hands-on with one, and it’s far from a cheesy device. In fact, it’s actually a little marvel.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2012 — On the surface of things, Asus’s Eee Pad Transformer Prime is just a wonderfully swell idea. Why have both an ultrabook and tablet when you can have one that is both? What if you could take your iPad, snap it onto a keyboard + trackpad, and have a MacBook Air?

It’s a nice dream, and, in actuality, the Transformer Prime is a beautiful piece of hardware. But the challenges aren’t hardware: they lie in software. And in software, neither Android nor iOS is yet up to the challenge of driving both a mobile and laptop OS. But after Windows 8 sets the bar higher, they both could be.

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA — It doesn’t yet have a name (Asus Eee Pad MeMO ME370T) but it does have a price point. Asus just announced a 7-inch tablet based on NVidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 chip and running Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich.

That’s an Android Fire price point but a boatload more horsepower. The Tegra 3 already runs Asus’s Transformer Prime tablet/PC, which is getting good reviews for performance.

Asus also announced an Ice Cream Sandwich update for the Transformer Prime, claiming it’s the first tablet to run the latest version of Google’s OS.

CES will bring out all the big players in the mobile processor game, each ready to flaunt the power, speed, and overall performance of their mobile processing chips. We’re going to give you a look at a few of the major players and what they plan to bring to the CES table. This year’s buzz word should be “quad-core,” and we’re hoping to see plenty of it (hopefully on phones).

As CES approaches, we are bound to get wind of many yet-to-be announced devices, like the one we see in the above image. This leaked image obtained by NOTEBOOKitalia reveals a mysterious 7″ ASUS Android tablet. Unfortunately the image didn’t come with any information to help identify itself, but we can sure speculate. We’re thinking this will end up being either a 7″ Eee Pad Transformer Prime, 7″ Eee Pad Memo, or possibly even a 7″ ASUS Padfone (though we doubt it).