Asus P320 - women's PDA, or what

Introduction, packaging

Women’s PDA. I don’t know how much will our readers be surprised by these two words, but I have been quite surprised. It’s such a product category that doesn’t really exist, just Asus had P320 assigned to it. So, a women’s PDA – how does that look like? I think the ladies don’t really use pocket computers, only if it’s necessary for their work or if they really like these gadgets. Those who fall in this second category will probably not be excited about the “small and beautiful” P320 and the bosses won’t give different handsets to their women employees either. So we still have the question: who is P320 made for?

It could have been made for lots of people, as not only women can like pocket handsets – to tell the truth I don’t like taking a 150 gram stuff with me. The success of HTC Touch and LG KS20 are a great example for this, so this new Asus would have its market, but please, why do they have to advertise it with such a lame marketing? I’m not sure I would buy something that is advertised with the “female” adjective, no matter if it would satisfy my needs or not.

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The handset, provided by SpeedShop, came in a large box that’s not feminine at all. It had a standard and a car charger, a car holder a black, patterned, plush holder, a headset, a data cable and the inevitable pile of manuals and CD besides the PDA.

Exterior

P320 has a really nice design, but it still didn’t make the hearts of my women acquaintances go wild. It’s quite small (it weighs 105 grams and its size is 99 x 55 x 13 mm), but as opposed to the ad it’s not the smallest PDA-phone, as we have the previously mentioned LG KS20. The handset comes in many different colors, I had the grey/black combo, which explains a lots of things. The materials used are pleasant, the back is soft and silky and provides a firm grip, while the front is made of shiny plastic that collects fingerprints. The stripe running along the sides is also shiny, the overall impression of the handset is quite positive.

There is the speaker on top of the front and the single status LED. Below them we can see the QVGA display with a diagonal of 2.6-inches and we cannot say anything negative about its picture quality, it has nice, bright colors – it’s just small, very small. The plexi on it is quite hard, so in case of P320 we don’t have to worry about breaking it accidentally. On the bottom there is an Asus logo and the main controls, which includes two softkeys, the call handling keys, the Windows and OK buttons and the five-way navigation pad. The backlight is yellowish, it’s not too powerful and it uncovers a couple of gaps, as there is some light coming from above/under a couple of keys, although there should be no space around there.

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The back is clean, it has the 2 megapixel camera and a Windows logo. Of course we have a handsfree speaker too on the top, near the power button. On the right we can see the connector of the external antenna, which is covered with a lid that takes a crowbar to come off; I lost a couple of nails as I was really curious about it. Below this there is the slider for locking the keypad and the camera’s exposure key.

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On the bottom there is the microphone, the reset button and the miniUSB connector, on the left we can see a hotkey, the volume control keys and the microSD slot, which is also covered by a bulletproof lid. In the top left corner there is the mid-sized, very plastic stylus, which, I think, is too low quality, compared to the handset.

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Hardware, speed

The inside of Asus P320 reveals lots of clumsiness from the designers. There is Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional running on a 200 MHz TI OMAP 850 CPU. This chipset is really outdated now, it doesn’t support 3G due to hardware limitations, it’s quite slow but at the same time it doesn’t consume too much power – although it doesn’t need much less than currently used, popular Qualcomm solutions that have double the clock speed. ROM is 128 MB large, RAM is 64 MB, we have 22 (!) MB free for storing data and 27 MB for running programs, which is a shockingly low amount. Although the storage capacity can be expanded, but we still need some internal memory for installing programs, as cabinet files are first copied over there by ActiveSync/WMDC. Asus P320 was the first handset where I couldn’t install VsBenchmark, there was just not enough space, no matter I have installed a 2 GB microSD card.

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Fortunately Pocket PC Mark ran without problems, here are the results:

Based on the benchmarks the handset is at about the same level as HTC Touch, that has similar hardware. During everyday use I have seen slowdowns a couple of times, I had to wait too much for program launches, but scrolling was surprisingly smooth, I have no idea what the manufacturer did with this part.

Today screen, software

After the first power-on we have to wait until the Asus software gets installed on the handset. Fortunately there is quite a lot of extra stuff, even the Today screen has been changed. We could have seen the same one on Asus Lamborghini too; TouchFLO is still much, much better, but it’s better than nothing. The plug-in has six tabs, the first is for time and date, the second for missed events, the third displays upcoming calendar entries, the fourth has weather forecast, the fifth displays RSS feeds we set up, while the sixth has the currently played music track. There a couple of pre-installed themes, I didn’t like any of them too much, but the wallpaper can even change automatically sometimes, that’s great.

There is nothing special amongst the programs. There is an RSS-reader, a Remote Calendar (for Google Calendar), Streaming Player, Task manager and Voice Commander. That’s it. No calendar for “those days”, no cloth size converter, although one would expect such stuff of a women’s PDA.

There is a bit more interesting stuff at the settings. The first thing is the icon labeled Asus Today; this is where we can set up the weather forecast plugin. We also have a Profile Manager, which is quite self-explanatory, just like Ring Tones, where we can set any kind of MP3 file as a ringtone. Probably many of you are familiar with Asus Status, the small thing that gets set up in the lower left corner of the Today screen is a great system monitor software that displays free memory and battery level too. Auto Cleaner sets up the X button so that really closes applications, not just minimizes them. The last is USB Setting, where we can choose between ActiveSync and USB Mass Storage modes.

Phone calls, data transfer, GPS

I didn’t have any big issues during phone calls, volume and sound quality were all okay. All call-related software are the default ones, so Outlook is used for the contact list and messaging too, there are no problems with it, as we can store contacts until there is free memory and messaging is just great.

The handset is not too good at data transfer. The GSM module is quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), but there is no 3G, so we can only use GPRS and EDGE for data transfer. We also have WiFi, which is a great thing. Bluetooth and miniUSB are both of version 2.0, which means A2DP support for the first and fast data transfer for the second. We also have a GPS, there is no information about it, but it’s A-GPS compatible and it can download information from the net too, in order to hasten positioning. Unfortunately I couldn’t try iGO 8, but 2006SE ran, even if it was a bit slow, I had no problem with reception strength. Thanks to the car charger and holder P320 is perfect for navigation, but the 2.6” display might be a serious problem for some people.

Multimedia

The camera’s resolution is 2 megapixels, it has autofocus, but no flash. The highest available resolutions are 1600 x 1200 for images and 176 x 144 pixels for videos, so this is quite weak video recording. The camera’s software launches extremely slowly and we should forget taking pictures of moving things as even a snail crawls out of the picture until P320 gets ready to shoot. There aren’t many settings (white balance and JPEG compression), but there is night- and macro mode, image sequencing, self-timer and some effects.

The images are quite good quality ones. Edge sharpness and color fidelity are even spectacular, but noise filtering is a bit more powerful than it should be, so the images are a bit like oil paintings. The dynamics range is medium, while chromatic aberration is quite powerful, but strangely there is a black color instead of purple at the gradients – those who are curious should check our the edges of the leafs on the plant on the fourth picture. Anyway, I have been quite content with the camera.

The music player is a bit modified Media Player. There are Asus skins, so the software can display album covers too. We can filter tracks by artist, genre and style, there is no equalizer. On the handsfree it’s a bit too soft, while quality is fine on the headset. The only problem that can be annoying during music playback is the handset’s speed, as it takes long minutes to refresh the media library. There is no FM radio.

Battery, summary

The battery has a capacity of 1100 mAh and it can be changed. Thanks to the low-consumption CPU the handset can stay online for up to 2 days, but we might expect even a longer uptime if we don’t use the PDA too much.

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Summary: Asus P320 would be a great handset, but it isn’t. It’s not for two reasons: the 200 MHz processor and the laughable amount of memory. Still, it looks good, it’s assembled fine, we get lots of accessories with it, it has WiFi and GPS and to tell the truth it has quite an amount of software too. But it’s slow, it’s damned slow, and this makes its use harder sometimes. Since it’s been on the market for a while it has already been through the usual Asus procedure: it had a high price in the beginning (for which no one will ever buy it) and then it has been reduced to a more acceptable level, currently it costs about €330 EUR. At this price it’s evidently worth a Cool product award and with a more powerful hardware it would clearly be Recommended. Well, maybe next time.

Asus P320

Bocha

Translated by Szaszati

The handset has been provided by www.speedshop.hu. Thanks! Please click here to access the shop.

Specifications

Asus P320
	Technology	GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
	Operating system	Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
	Size	99 x 55 x 13 mm
	Weight	105 grams
	Processor	200 MHz TI OMAP 850
	ROM / RAM	128 / 64 MB
	Display	2.6-inch diagonal, 240 x 320 pixels resolution, 16 bit color depth touchscreen
	Expandability	microSD
	WiFi	802.11b/g
	Infra / Bluetooth	none / 2.0 (A2DP too)
	GPS receiver	present (A-GPS too)
	Audio	miniUSB output, microphone, mono speaker
	Camera	2 megapixels, autofocus
	Battery	1100 mAh changeable Li-Ion
	Other	-