ASUS P535

Day 1: Hey there good lookin’…
The P535 is beautifully finished in charcoal grey and exudes a quality feel. Even though the side buttons on the body and the four-way scroll button are chromed, it’s matte, and therefore doesn’t look gaudy. The fit and finish is excellent, and the rear cover fits flush-no play even after multiple SIM card and battery inspections. Accessories are abundant, and their quality is excellent.

Day 5: Pop the hood…
The crisp 240 x 320, 2.6-inch screen is a joy. The P535 is devoid of a keypad… don’t lose the stylus! There’s a 2.0 megapixel camera with auto-focus and flash. The battery is 1300 mAh, on par with similar-spec PDAs. Its innards consist of a 520 MHz PXA270 processor from Intel-this provides oodles of clout to run resource-hungry apps. With 64 MB of RAM and 256 MB of fast NAND ROM, the P535 offers more storage than many other PDAs. More on that later…

Day 7: Cry to me…
While signal reception and call quality is on par for a PDA phone, I have a gripe with the loudness (or rather the lack thereof) of the speaker. Even talking about the hands-free, I say my ancient Nokia 6630 gives much better sound quality and volume. Another negative is the 2.5mm jack, this means that my lovely Bose headphones won’t work with this phone. A plus is the hold switch reminiscent to the iPods-it freezes all buttons and screen activity.
 
Day 11: Upward mobility
Surfed at office using the P535, the integrated “g” class wireless connectivity is good for road warriors. The P535 is also Bluetooth 2.0 ready and supports A2DP, so you can enjoy your tunes with any Bluetooth headset.
Transferring data to my PC using the USB cable was slow, a little more than I’d have liked-to my dismay, I discovered this is a USB 1.1 device.
 
Day 13: Peashooter!
Necessity demanded I use the camera today. I must say the auto-focus works well, and camera quality is comparable to the similarly-rated K750i.
 
Day 16: Words…
A conference today. I found jotting down quick notes a pain, especially after the full-size QWERTY layout I’m accustomed to. This is not for those into typing long e-mails or documents. You’ll need to invest in a Bluetooth keyboard. Handwriting recognition is good-at par with other Windows devices.

Day 20: I’m all ears
We were doing some video mixing for a workshop. I played around recording voices, and we all had some fun. Later I transferred these files onto my PC. Sound quality is good, and this is something that can be used for the odd interview: the mic is quite sensitive. However, a Dictaphone it’s not.

Day 23: Deck of cards
Attended a client meet today. I used the business card scanner utility, which I must say works very well, extracting nearly every detail accurately. Very, very nifty… Plus I handled the remote presentation using the bundled application in conjunction with my laptop’s Bluetooth. (One installation later, that is.) The software works flawlessly- another area where you can use the P535, and effectively.

Day 26: Homeward Bound…
The P535 is all packed to despatch. My thoughts centre on words like “convergence” and “convenience”-an apposite way to describe a device so small and yet so powerful. A full keypad less means it won’t replace my PDA. However, for those who won’t miss all those keys, this is one powerful, compact, stylish, yet functional mobile workstation.

Michael Browne
Digit.in
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Digit.in
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