Asus A730 Pocket PC
Personal Computers have become more personal with the advent of the PDAs. After all, these PDAs have become the order of the day. In the beginning, they were confined only to the men of affairs but now as people have recognised their uses, they have become a part and parcel of even the common man on the streets. Especially, the youth are attracted to these PDAs due to the special features and easy usability. They have now become the devices that not only beautify your look but also make your work easier. So, all the electronic giants in the market like Sony, Samsung, and HP have started producing the PDAs. But at the same time, the other companies have also started their own products at a much cheaper rate and people have now turned toward such PDAs.
Asus has announced the release of its new PDA, the Asus MyPal A730 to compete with the HP iPaq and the Dell Axim. After a lot of misfires in the past, Asus has decided to be more specific and professional. Has it been successful in achieving that? Go through this to know about it and more about the A730.
Design:
Light and Resemblance:
Since it is a pocket PC, it is small in size and is compact for carrying during travel. It is certainly not the slimmest phone in the world but it is sleeker than many. At 117.5mm x 72.8mm x 16.9mm (L x W x H), it is ranked as a pretty comfortable PDA. It can easily be fitted into your pockets. It may look a bit larger than the normal PDAs, but it is made of light material and it weighs only about 170 grams and is lighter than many.
It also resembles its closest competitors, the Dell Axim and the Fujitsu Pocket Loox. Its front panel is slightly dark grey in colour and all the buttons, the sides and the back panel are silver in colour. This may seem like a colour clash since the combination of silver and grey may not seem to be the perfect one, but the design is fine enough to override this. Another important thing that should be noticed here is that the device does not retain fingerprints so it always is clean.
Ports and buttons:
The power button is on the top left hand side along with the voice recorder button. On the top right hand side there is the device locking switch to cover the battery. Also on the top, there are two expansion slots available, one above the other, along with the headphone jack. Added to these, there is also the infrared port. So, the top of the Asus A730 Pocket PC is a pretty busy region. While most of such devices place all these slots and ports either on the sides or at the bottom, Asus has gone with the top.
Unlike the most of the battery covers, this one slides off at once revealing the battery spot. But the quality of this cover is questionable. It is not robust enough to give your device complete protection. Also, you may feel that with prolonged usage, the slide cover may become weak and it may finally break, leaving you in an awkward position with the back of your device exposed. The camera is at the top right hand side at the back of the device. This camera is so well placed inside the device so as to make it safe from easy damage. Below the camera is the silver mirror that is useful when taking self pictures. Beside it are the flash and the LED light that are used to provide light to the camera in dim light situations. Below them is the speaker grille. The stylus is a bit of a surprise here. It is a metal stick with plastic ends. It is placed in a rather new position, at the bottom right while the conventional position is at the top corner. This new position means that the stylus cannot be taken out when the device is inside the cradle.
All these points discussed above give us a gist of the design. It is okay, but if those small minors can be rectified, it will look a lot better.
Display:
The Asus A730 Pocket PC sports a 3.7″ transflective LCD display. The size of the display is pretty good and is also comfortable for viewing. It may not the best but it is good and does not have any problems regarding colours and graphics. Regarding graphics, the Asus A730 can be compared to the PDAs from HP and Dell. The graphics are really good and there is also VGA that improves the graphics performance. The screen resolution is 640 x 480 pixels and the 16 bit display exhibits 65k colours and hence, the overall display is very good.
Features:
Processor:
The A730 uses Intel’s latest and the fastest processor, the Intel XScale PXA270. This is also featured in the PDAs from HP, Dell, Loox 720 and other prime PDAs in the market. But when the processor of HP iPaq is 624 MHz, Asus went for the 520 MHz version of the processor. Even 520 MHz is very good for processor speed and you do not find such good processors in many of the PDAs. So, this enhances the performance of the device and also fastens it. Such good processors are so robust that they are fast even while multitasking and hence you are able to finish more works simultaneously. So, there are no complaints at all regarding the Intel XScale processor.
Operating System:
The operating system featured here is the Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition. This is just like the conventional Windows operating system you will see on the computers. It is the latest version of the operating systems for the pocket PCs and will certainly add a few feathers to the cap of the Asus A730. In short, it is simple and a user friendly OS.
Memory:
The default memory of the MyPal A730 pocket PC is 64 MB. But all that you will be getting is about 17MB exclusive of all the memory that is used by the RAM and the processor for the normal functioning of the device. But 17MB is almost nothing and you have nothing to store files. So, you will have to upgrade the memory card for more memory so that you can store files, music, videos and photos. A memory card of at least 2GB of memory is recommended so that you can get the optimum performance from your device.
Camera:
The camera of the Asus A730 is a pretty good one although not the best ever from Asus. You will not want to print and frame the pictures taken by the camera but they are better than the pictures taken by the normal mobile phone cameras. The colour pattern in the pictures is slightly different from the real objects but this not a big problem. The video recording part of the camera is also satisfactory. The Photo Viewer is provided for you to see the captured photos in the form of either JPEG or BMP files. You can also watch the slide shows of these pictures. You can edit these photos or the photo and video settings using the Photo Editor software. In this, you can provide different special effects to your photos such as blurring, sepia, negative and neon, frame attachment and funny texts. All the pictures captured by you are displayed in the photo album in the form of thumbnails or a list of photos as chosen by you.
Expansions:
The Asus A730 PDA Pocket PC has an SD Card slot that supports SDIO and also the CF that is compatible with both the type I and II cards. There are also Bluetooth and Infrared for enhancing the expansion facility. The ports and the card reader worked very well but a USB CDROM did not connect. For fixing this problem, you will have to turn towards drivers and USB drivers for Pocket PCs are very rare in the market. But overall, the expansion facility is fine and working well.
Cradle:
The Asus A730 has a rather unforeseen cradle. The first thing anybody will notice and will be surprised to see is that the cradle lacks a second battery charging slot. Although it is not that qualitative when you talk about the plastic material outside, there are a few changes that Asus has made in order to make it look more attractive. Most of the cradles have a USB cable at the back of the cable, which makes it annoying for one in order to connect it to the PC or any other hard drive, for an instance. Anybody would always want to clear all the mess by connecting without the wire. It is better to connect using Bluetooth rather than using the USB cable. Asus has thus introduced such system in its cradle so that the synchronisation of the device with a PC or an external hard drive is easier and faster. This effort from Asus is commendable, although the cradle looks cheap for its cost.
Wireless Communication:
The Asus A730 is powered by the latest wireless technology including the Bluetooth and the Infrared software. Bluetooth is one of the most used and the most appeared software when you talk about mobile technology. It has become so popular that every device that is out there in the market definitely has Bluetooth as one of its features. The Asus A730 is not an exception and the Bluetooth of this PDA works well and particularly very well when the connection is between another A730. So, you can easily transfer the files between your device and any other Bluetooth compatible device. The Infrared feature also works in a similar manner. The speed of the Infrared is about 115.2 kbps and is reasonable. But the efficiency of the Infrared is not as good as Bluetooth and it also depends on the orientation of the devices that are to be synced. But it is always an additional tool that helps in synchronisation. So, with these two features, the wireless communication of the Asus A730 is very good and is appreciable.
Software Bundle:
The Asus A730 provides you with an array of software that is pretty much useful on a daily basis. Some of the software is particularly for business and office use but the bundle of software is so designed that everyone is benefited by it. The various software that are featured in the A730 is; Microsoft Pocket Outlook that includes Contacts, Calendar, Inbox, Tasks and Notes. All these are in particular are for office use but features like calendar and contacts ate useful to all. Pocket Word and Pocket Excel help you in managing your documents and they are similar to those of the conventional programs you will find in Microsoft office. You then have the Windows Media Player 9.0 that plays all your digital media such as audio and video files that are stored in the memory. The file types that are officially supported by the player are mp3, Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video. Other file types may or may not comply with the player and some of them may play and the others may not. But it is always safe to run the files that are supported by the player.
Miscellaneous Software:
The Asus A730 PDA phone includes the MSN Messenger that helps you to be in contact with all your dear ones. Even while you are on the go, you can send messages, chat with your friends and family, and share your views, photos and other files through this facility. The Microsoft Transcriber is an excellent feature that has the special ability to recognise your handwriting and then transcribes the writing into text form afterwards. It also allows you to edit and format the writings and then save it in order to convert it to text form later. The Terminal Services Client allows you to connect to a Microsoft Windows Terminal based server. One of the most interesting features you will find here is the Note Maker. This feature allows you to create handwritten or typed notes, recordings and drawings and save them in the memory and open them or edit them in the future. The Voice Recorder records the speech sounds and then saves them as files.
ActiveSync:
The Microsoft ActiveSync 3.7.1 software allows you to sync between your device and a desktop computer and then exchange information between them in the form of files so that you can free the device memory whenever it is full. The Asus Settings Mode allows you to change the settings of your system and save these settings. This feature also gives you real time system information. You can configure settings such as brightness, execution mode, audio and many others here. With the Asus Backup feature, you can always backup your system files, data and folders into the system’s main memory.
The Asus Smart Keeper option saves all the files and processes temporarily when the device is low on battery or is suddenly switched off. This option functions just like the hibernation mode that you will see in the laptop computers. All the programs are run again when the device is rebooted.
Applications:
There are also numerous applications installed in the device to provide you with more options and to ease you work. The list of the applications that are featured in the Asus A730 include; Presentation DX application helps you in converting, browsing and then playing the Microsoft PowerPoint presentation files with special effects and animations. The Pocket painter allows you to paint your imagination and then saves your files and hence you can print them. Not only painting but you can also modify the pictures captured by the camera by drawing on them. The MoneyTracer application is a powerful tool to store your financial details securely and it also provides cash, cheque, and credit card accounting management and hence helping you in financial management.
The Engineering Calculator is one of the unique features in the Asus A730. You normally see a standard calculator in all the PDAs but this one has got a scientific calculator and hence it is very useful for the engineering students. The Pocket Book is useful in reading books in your device. This Pocket Book comes with Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese languages and also has few other languages that support reading in your device. Along with these applications, there are also few games that are intended for your entertainment whenever you are bored.
Performance:
With all the features, applications and software bundle discussed above, you can expect pretty good performance from the Asus A730 Large Size VGA Display Pocket PC. The experience you get from this new PDA from Asus may not be top notch but it is assured that you will get good value for your money. The processor is good and the speed of the device is commendable. The device does not get slow during multitasking and you get a reasonably fast performance. The performance part has been developed a lot when you compare this one with the previous devices from Asus. This device can be compared to the ones from HP and Dell and that too at much lower rates. You also do not need to run to the service centres every now and then as the A730 very seldom troubles you. Yes, you will be content with the performance.
Battery:
The 1150 mAh lithium ion polymer battery gives you a so-so battery life of about two and a half hours. This is comparatively very low because an average PDA out there gives you at least 4-5 hours of battery. Since there is a need for a greater battery life, it is recommended that you always carry a spare battery of the same power or you can also buy an 1800 mAh battery separately in order to enhance the battery life. This low battery spoils the performance of the device, which is very good otherwise. But since there are many features and applications, you may have to compromise here.
Warranty:
Asus offers you parts and labour warranty for a period of one year from the date of purchase. More details regarding the warranty of the device are provided inside the leaflet that is inside in the package.
Verdict:
The Asus A730 comes with a very good design and display. There are numerous useful features and options. All the applications and the software are pretty good and they are complemented by a reasonably good performance. It also costs tad lesser than the other similar PDAs in the market. The only minus in this device is that there is no Wi-Fi facility. Asus has released the A730 with Wi-Fi and named it as A730W. This PDA features all those discussed above plus the Wi-Fi. So, that PDA is more recommended than this one. Considering all this and the points discussed above, this PDA from Asus is a very handy one and is affordable. It is good for students but for business professionals, the PDAs from HP and Dell are recommended.
Check Dell Pocket PCs and HP Pocket PC Reviews in this website.
Asus A730 Pocket PC PDA – Technical Specification Table
| Manufacturer | Asus |
| Model Name | Asus myPal A730 |
| Product Type | Pocket PC |
| Dimensions | 117.5 x 72.8 x 16.9 mm |
| Colour | Grey and Silver |
| Weight | 170 g |
| Screen and display | TFT LCD colour display |
| Colour resolution | VGA resolution with 65k of 640 x 480 pixels VGA pixel colour display, backlight and colour sensing screen |
| Input devices | Stylus and Touch screen |
| Imaging features | Camera, Photo Viewer, Photo Editor, Photo Album,
Video Recording |
| Messaging options | SMS, MSN |
| JAVA | No |
| CPU Processor | Intel XScale PXA270 520 MHz |
| Supported Flash Memory Cards | SD Memory Card , CompactFlash (type II) |
| Memory | Built-in 64 MB Flash ROM |
| Compatibility | SDIO |
| Video | WMV |
| Audio | MP3,WMA |
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows® Mobile 2003 Second Edition |
| Wi-Fi enabled | No |
| Battery | 1150 mAh battery with about 2.5 hours of talk time |
| Utilities | Word, Excel, Power Point, Clock & Alarms, File Explorer, Notes, Voice recorder, Engineering Calculator and MSN |
| Wireless Communication | Bluetooth and Infrared |
| Warranty | One year |
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