The Asus Padfone sparked imaginations (and attracted hearty guffaws) when it was first announced at the Computex Expo last May, and now the phone-inside-a-tablet will reportedly be released at another conference: The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which is being held in February next year.

According to Nicole Scott from netbooknews.com, the hybrid will also be released with the same Tegra 3 chipset as its younger brother, the Asus Eeepad Transformer Prime. The Nvidia-crafted chipset has attracted a lot of attention in recent months, and looks set to become the standard for both Android phones and tablets. Tegra 3 is also reportedly at the heart of a number of upcoming devices, including the HTC Quattro tablet, the HTC Edge and HTC Zeta smartphones as well as an unnamed tablet from Lenovo.

The phone/tablet/thing will reportedly come with Ice Cream Sandwich too, the latest version of Android produced for both tablets and phones, pre-installed. That’s not too surprising given that expected release date, as most manufacturers are aiming for the release of an Ice Cream Sandwich device, whether tablet or phone, by the first quarter of next year.

For more information, check out the official Padfone page on Asus’ site, and stay tuned for another further developments!

This article was written by William Judd. William writes for Mobile Fun, the UK’s leading online retailer of the Griffin Survivor, HTC accessories and the Panasonic Lumix case.