Asus P750 Smartphone
Filed Under (ASUS, Smartphones) by admin on 29-11-2008 >> 73 views
Tagged Under : Asus, Asus P750 Smartphone, Smartphones
We like Asus here at TrustedReviews. In particular we like the whole Eee PC concept and execution and we like the company’s approach to smartphones too. The last smartphone we looked at from Asus was the P526 which was good, but not ‘top banana’ good.
Now along comes the P750 and I have to say it is the best effort I’ve seen from Asus yet. It ticks an awful lot of boxes, though there are still some irritations.
The P750 is a Windows Mobile 6 Professional smartphone and as such it enters a crowded market. It needs to be pretty special to stand out. Asus knows this, and has risen to the challenge.
In design terms, though, Asus does the P750 few favours. It looks like – and indeed it is – a very chunky candybar style smartphone. It weighs a fairly hefty 130g and is 113mm tall, 58mm wide and 17.4mm thick. There is no mini keyboard lurking in all that thickness, just a numberpad on the front casing.
The black and silver colour scheme isn’t going to bowl anyone over, and nor is the teeny navigation joystick that sits under the screen. I loathe the mini-joystick concept, and this one is as fiddly to use as any other I’ve tried.
However, there is a scroll wheel on the left edge of the casing which can also be used for moving around within applications, and you can always resort to the touchscreen, accessible with a fingertip or the stylus. I’d choose the former every time, as Asus’ stylus is short and incredibly lightweight.
Now in having a touchscreen and all those front (and side) mounted buttons this device is a potential recipe for disaster. Let it rattle around in your pocket and you could call a speed dial, play your music, erase files, and do goodness knows what else thanks to unintended button presses.
However, Asus has thoughtfully included a slider on the right edge of the casing that activates a key and screen lock. Slide it in the right direction and you simply can’t accidentally trigger any controls till you slide it into the unlock position. Why don’t more Windows Mobile devices have this simple, yet effective system in place?
One of the advantages of a chunky chassis is being able to accommodate a big screen, at least in standard smartphone terms. At 2.6inches corner-to-corner I found it roomy enough for everyday use, though I wonder whether the 240 x 320 pixels might have benefited from being upped to 480 x 640.
But it’s inside the casing, in terms of both software and hardware, that Asus really makes me smile. For a shade over £300 you get a Windows Mobile 6 device with HSDPA support up to 3.6Mbps, as well as tri-band GSM with GPRS and EDGE for your mobile communications.
You’ll also find Wi-Fi built in, and Bluetooth of course. And there’s a SiRFStar III GPS antenna. Now, admittedly, there is no sat-nav software provided with the P750, but here’s where I make my first mention of the bundled software on this device.
There are two utilities for using the GPS antenna. Location Courier lets you send your position to up to five recipients at a time as part of an SMS message, and Travelog captures your GPS footprint as a KMZ file. This is the file format accepted by Google Earth, so you can record a trip then drop it into Google Earth complete with self-saved POIs.
As for performance, the 520MHz Marvell PXA270M processor might not be one of the most widespread in mobile devices, but it seemed to zip along well enough during testing.
Battery life was really very good too. I asked the P750 to play music non stop from a microSD card with its screen forced on. It shaded over 12 hours which makes it the best Windows Mobile 6 device I’ve benchmarked in this way – and I have benchmarked a few, I can tell you!
When it comes to memory the 256MB of flash and 64MB of RAM aren’t that wonderful. But the microSD card slot on the right edge of the casing supports SDHC which means you can add comparatively vast amounts of memory to the P750 if you have the desire to do so.
There is a front-facing VGA-resolution camera for video-calling. With all this hardware goodness you might expect the main camera to be higher than 3-megapixels, but that’s all you get here. There is no flash, and no self-portrait mirror. Asus has included easy access to the various camera controls by putting tappable icons on screen, but these are a bit small and a fingernail will only be precise enough if you have dainty digits. Otherwise you’ll have to use that horrid stylus to tap at them.
One feature the camera does have is auto focus. This comes in handy for the business card scanning software. I’ve seen this before on Windows Mobile smartphones and it always impresses. You photograph a business card and the OCR software extracts key information and shoves it into the Contacts application. You can make any edits that are needed manually.
There is a lot more by way of added software, including a utility that can show up to three time zones at once so you can set up phone calls or meetings; an RSS reader to complement the Windows Mobile Web browser; a password-protected area of memory for storing the stuff you’d rather keep secret; and the ability to control the device remotely via Bluetooth. There’s even a graphics-driven alternative to the Windows Mobile Today screen just in case you want a more mobile phone-looking main screen.
Verdict
Asus’ P750 is a very aggressively priced device and under the hood it bundles a large array of software and capability. I can’t say I like the mini-joystick or the hardware design, but in terms of value for money this is a very impressive smartphone.
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