Smartphone Blog

Asus made always good Pocket PCs and smartphones. The best features of their devices are good configuration and particularly long time of wark on one battery charge. The Pocket PC’s from Asus are usually able to work 20 to 30 hours. Of course this time is considerably reduced if you use WLAN or GPS, but to those values are anyway very good. It is therefore surprising that the Asus devices compared to HTC or Nokia are less widespread. That could be because Asus invest not so much in marketing in Europe. To change somehow this fact for a bit, I will report, in my opinion, about very successful smartphone model from Asus.
As expected, Asus P526 offers a lot of features. The phone runs on Windows Mobile 6 and offers such features as a touch screen with a resolution of 240×320 pixels, Bluetooth 1.2, WLAN b / g, GPS (Sirf III), SD card slot and 2 MP camera. The phone comes with a car mount, 1GB SD card, and as Destinator navigation software.
Asus P526 is not a Pocket PC with a built-in GSM module, but a true smartphone with a touchscreen. That’s why the phone is compact and has a full phone keyboard. This design makes it difficult to mount a large display, so the device offers only a display with a size of 2.6 inch.
Windows Mobile and Destinator are good optimized for such displays.
In my opinion, Asus made with this phone a very successful combination between 2 different device classes. Normally, the manufacturers offer either a Windows Mobile phone without a keyboard, or, if the cell phone is in the usual mobile phone form factor, it would have not any touchsreen.

The new firmware is finally released and could be downloaded at Asus site for free. I will install it today or tomorrow, depends on the time that I will need to backup all my data.

Update:

Ok, I was able to reflash my Asus P525 with a new firmware and now I have windows mobile 6.0 on my device. It seems, that this OS is based on WM5.0, I don’t see big difference between WM5 and WM6, only a graphic design is now more similar to Windows Vista. There are some new utilities that the new OS offers. But I think, that I don’t really need such features how live search or live messenger on my PDA. I use mChat with ICQ protocol and it is enough for me. I noticed that WM6 needs a little bit more RAM than WM5. It is nor really good, but it could be worse. (Microsoft…)

My conclusion is that I did not lose anything with this update, but I don’t have many advantages with it too. A nice graphic, file crypting and some other (un?)useful tools, it is all new that I can find at this moment.