Asus P735: Function over form

By Alex Villafania
INQUIRER.net

TAIWANESE firms are up to the task when it comes to personal digital assistants. Take, for example, Dopod and their new owners HTC, who were both making their own PDA phones before recently tying the knot, so to speak. Both companies churned out new models against the dominance of HP (iPaq) and even RIM (Blackberry). Most of the PDA phones that come out of Taiwan are actually appealing to the mass market. However, there are a few firms that still have some way to go before cutting the grade in the cutthroat PDA phone market.

One of the new entrants to the PDA manufacturing market is Asus, one of the biggest PC components manufacturers from Taiwan. They only started coming out with a PDA a few years back. Their latest is the P735, a mid-level PDA phone that competes in the same category as Dopod and O2. The P735 boasts of several features not normally seen in the same mid-level model category.

For most buyers of PDAs, it’s function over form but usually the design of the PDA becomes a major giveaway. For the P735, the design is as good as a brick. Mostly housed in plastic, the P735 is colored brushed silver metal and dark gray silver in some parts, making it look like it just came out of sheet metal manufacturing. While the buttons are neatly laid out with their functions engraved into the metal, it seems as if the designer has yet to do some tweaking with the final look of the buttons. Even the front speaker doesn’t show as much simple flair as its other Taiwanse brethren. The P735’s speaker is merely a slat on top of the screen.

But usually, beauty is just skin-deep and in the case of the P735, it’s just the cover. Asus may have taken away the design factor but it did stock up the P735 with a number of features usually reserved for the elite models of other brands. The P735 is one of the first PDA phones to have Windows Mobile version 6. This allows the P735 to function like a real PDA phone as it can connect to a local cellular provider depending on the SIM card that has been inserted. If the cellular network provider supports UMTS, the P735 can easily access the Internet. It also boasts of WLAN and Bluetooth connectivity, which can be toggled on and off easily through the unit. On the other hand, the model does not support HSDPA, which is a much faster wireless connectivity. However, the UMTS connection still does the trick. Besides, the only time anyone could appreciate HSDPA is when they are downloading large files or viewing videos.

Speaking of which, Windows Mobile 6 features its own multimedia player that can run more common types of videos, such as MPEG and AVI files. Downloading codecs for the Windows Media Player would allow more users to view other types of video formats on the P735.

One of the applications present in this model is the Remote Presenter that can turn the P735 into a remote control for multimedia presentation projected from a PC or laptop that has Bluetooth. Another application is the My Secrets application that encrypts certain files to prevent it from being viewed when the PDA phone is accessed by another person. It also has the WorldCard Mobile application that captures the content of business cards taken by its digital camera. Another bundled application is Skype Mobile, which makes the P735 doubly useful as it can connect to other Skype users through voice over IP.

The P735’s digital camera is also one that it can boast about as it has 2 megapixel resolution and also has its own auto-focus and a flash. The camera has a preset number of shooting modes corresponding to the need of the photographer and the availability of light. Of course, it has its own video recording capability but the video is limited only to 320 by 240.

Going back to the buttons, the unit has 11 of them. Perhaps the designers did intentionally make the buttons “disappear” into the casing of the unit to give it a nice simple look. The front side has six of the buttons, two of which have a double-purpose. There are the call/end call keys on either side of the unit, the four-way button, the enter button in the middle, the video call button on the left side, the task switcher on the right and two programmable function buttons on the upper left and right side. Meanwhile, a volume control button is on the left side along with a digital shutter button for the camera. The left side has hold and voice recorder buttons, which are new features in a PDA phone.

The P735 uses an Intel (now Marvell) 520 Mhz processor with 256MB or RAM, a far cry from the 400Mhz Xscale of Intel and 64MB RAM in some PDAs in its class. This makes the P735 among the fastest PDA phones in the market.

Design-wise, the Asus P735 is as stiff as a brick and its color scheme makes it seem like a prototype unit that has yet to come up with a proper casing. It is surprising, though, that with the great big number of Windows Mobile-based PDAs out there, Asus has yet to come up with one that would turn heads and make people ask what it is. Still, what it lacks in good looks, it compensates for with great functionality.

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