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Full PDA, Half Phone

ASUS has brought their full line-up of PDA phones to India, and the P525 is a PDA with a number pad—something of a rarity. It’s a touchscreen running Windows Mobile 5 and the charcoal grey that made the P535 such a good looker makes another appearance. The P525 is a beautiful beast—all smoky grey with chrome buttons down the side panel in sharp contrast. We also liked the screen—crisp, clear and good contrast, visible even in daylight.

The number keys look like sculpted buttons that have been integrated into the body—they give just the right amount of feedback when used, and never feel tacky. We don’t like the joystick, though—it’s too small and smooth and there’s insufficient tactile feedback. We also didn’t like the fact that the joystick’s in between the number keys 2 and 5—this affects access to the number 2.

Voice Commander makes another appearance—a really excellent piece of code, this—that allows you to do so much more with voice commands. The excellent business card scanner is also preinstalled. There’s also a password protected security application called My Secrets that allows you to protect your files by encrypting them. All the usual Windows Mobile applications are present as well.

There’s a dedicated button for the camera, which is surprisingly good for a PDA. The volume button is very ergonomic, as is the hold button—which prevents keypad, button and screen use.

While the loudspeaker offers decent volume, we lament the volume levels on the hands-free kit—it’s just too low, be it music or a voice call. While on the topic of calls, signal quality could have been better—a patent weakness of most PDAs. If you need a good phone, please look elsewhere.

Where the P525 scores is in PDA functionality (even though it foregoes a QWERTY keypad), looks—nobody will disagree here—and, of course, the software package that improves productivity by quite an extent. At Rs 19,000 the ASUS P525 is a good PDA, but a strictly average phone. It’s flashy for sure, and will draw glances anywhere. You’ll have to decide what is more important to you—PDA features, or a phone.

Specifications
Weight—160 grams, Screen—2.8-inches, 240x320 pixels, 65K colours, 128 MB inbuilt memory, 2 MP camera with autofocus

Contact : ASUS Technology Pvt. Ltd   
Phone : 022—6766 8800
Web site : http://in.asus.com
Price : Rs 19,000