ASUS P835 Mobile Phone

ASUS’ mobile handset division, I can safely say, is a hardcore business oriented segment of the community. The P835 is no exception. Irrespective of the camera and large display the handset is designed for business and maybe a little bit of play as well. But how well does it serve the purpose and is it worth its Rs. 31,000 pricing? Here’s my opinion.

Form Factor
The ASUS P835 is a rather generically designed handset. I can’t really say it’s too heavy or too light or too slim or thick as it feels just like any other large screened WinMob handset. In fact it looks quite like the Omnia, except for the navigation system. The Omnia came with an optical mouse pad and ASUS has decided to go with a trackball like the BlackBerry’s. Its large 3.5-inch resistive touchscreen sports a 480 x 800 pixel resolution with 65K colors. Just under the display are a set of four touch sensitive shortcuts. These don’t light up so you’ll have to memorize their placement. Call Answer and End buttons are located on either side of the trackball. The leather finish on the bottom of the handset gives off an air of sophistication.

On one side at the top are the volume/zoom keys followed by a switch for a screen lock. A microSD card slot, camera key and slot for the stylus are on the other side. A five megapixel camera lens and speaker are on the rear end. A mini USB slot which is universal for the charger, USB and handsfree is located at the bottom.

I have to say, as generic as it may be, it really isn’t a bad looking handset. But we can’t go judging a book by its cover or a mobile by its flashy looks, so here’s my experience with the P835, under the hood.

Features and Performance_Interface_

The handset runs on a Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional OS and is powered by a Qualcomm 7201A, 528MHz processor. ASUS has also included two separate UI’s to use which is totally unnecessary. One provides quick access to functions and can be accessed via a shortcut key located below the screen. It’s well laid out and quick but not fluid when it comes to navigating through it. The other UI is Glide which is proprietary to ASUS. It’s got three variations. Unfortunately none of them, except the default stays permanent. The default version makes the desktop look very cluttered if you’ve got other shortcuts as well.

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If I selected the business look for the desktop and I got a call and disconnected, I’d wind up back at the default desktop. It was really annoying. What a waste, having two very intuitive UI’s and not being able to use them properly.

The touchscreen experience was also not very consistent. You’ll never know when to use the track ball and believe me there are specific occasions when you’ll have no choice. At times I was completely unable to access any options in the Programs section no matter how I tapped the screen (with or without the stylus). For some reason the screen became useless for selection and I was only able to scroll, I had to use the trackball for selection. This was also the case with certain applications like EziPhoto. In the settings option, even though icons are large enough for even my stubby fingers, they refused to be selected, even with a stylus; once again it was the trackball to the rescue. Trackball navigation itself was not as good as on a BlackBerry.

I wasn’t too thrilled with the onscreen QWERTY keyboard. It will take some getting used to. Or you can just use the stylus, which means using both hands. There’s also a Half QWERTY option as well as a phone pad which was the easiest to use. The Windows Mobile handwriting options were also present with a Block and letter recognizer and a Transcribe option. Sadly they were a little too slow.
To put it in a nutshell, you’re going to have to use both hands most of the time while using this handset. My presumption was that in this day and age of touchscreen technology, the stylus would become redundant. Apparently that’s not true. How unfortunate.
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Media
When it comes to media the P835 struggles to provide a good experience. Utilizing the standard Windows media player for video and audio is not enough these days. Since the handset comes with 4 Gigs of internal memory and support for external, it’s only natural to take advantage of the space and load up the handset with as much media as possible. The problem is you’ll have to make sure you do it all at one shot or the native Windows Media player will take forever locating all the files and updating the library. Even with the 528MHz processor, it still took over 3 minutes to find all my files.

Playback of audio was too low and I found the earphones a little uncomfortable. Even with a volume adjuster on the handsfree, the decibel level was still too low. There are no EQ or other audio settings available to help with the audio quality. On the plus side though, ASUS’ EziMusic player tries to offer users a better audio experience, and succeeds in doing so only in the visual sense. The player’s layout is so much better than Windows Media and it also allows you to create ringtones by selecting specific portions of a track to be used as a tone. It’s also quite easy creating a playlist on this player.

Videos can only be viewed via Windows Media Player. Even after I converted files to suit the resolution of the large screen I wasn’t too thrilled with the playback. Clarity was not too bad but if there were more than three applications running in the background, videos would not play too well. However, even after I ended all tasks, the video playback was relatively smooth but when it came to forwarding or rewinding the file, there was a lot of static and hic-ups before it resumed playback. It wasn’t an altogether bad experience and the large screen is great for the same. Due to the lack of a proper accelerometer, you’ll have to manually switch to landscape mode, but if you happen to graze the screen a bit you’re going to wind up back in portrait. Double clicking on the screen didn’t work. Another thing missing was an FM radio, there is however, a Streaming player.

The EziPhoto feature was quite the same as with the P565. It allows you to view images via month or create a photo album of particular files. The accelerometer works here, although it takes its own sweet time rotating images to landscape. You can use flick control to navigate from image to image by sliding your finger across the screen. Images and videos can be directly uploaded to sites like Flickr and YouTube. It’s easy to set up. Sadly there don’t seem to be any sites like Facebook added to the mix. You can also edit images but only when accessed from anywhere else except the EziPhoto application.

Business and Connectivity Options
The handset has a lot of support for connectivity but of course there’s really no difference when compared to any other Windows mobile device. To start of with, there’s Wi-Fi and 3G support with HSDPA, not that we’re going to be able to use it just yet of course. GPRS/EDGE and basic WAP connectivity is what we’ll have to be happy with till 3G becomes the new standard. If you’re an existing WinMob user you’ll have no trouble setting up your email accounts IMAP or POP3 or using Microsoft Exchange.