Asus P835

Earlier this year, Asus announced that it would be teaming up with navigation device manufacturer Garmin to create the Garmin-Asus brand. But products take months from conception before reaching the market and, understandably, the Taiwan company would have products in the pipeline before the Garmin deal was inked. That's exactly what the P835 is, the last touchscreen cellular device from Asus before every subsequent one starts to bear the Garmin-Asus name. Not only is this handheld packed with features, it has an attractive price of S$798 before subsidies. But is it worth the asking price? Let's find out.

Design

Once you pick up the P835, you can feel that it's a solid device. At 148g, it isn't light, and that's to some extent due to the metal parts used in the design. A small portion under the buttons has a faux leather finish, which supposedly gives it a professional look, and is not unlike what's found on the back of the BlackBerry Bold. With dimensions of 115 x 59 x 13.8mm, it isn't particularly compact because of the length. Overall, it doesn't feel as sleek as devices like the Apple iPhone or HTC Touch Diamond2, and probably won't turn any heads for attractiveness.

The length of the device has a lot to do with its large 3.5-inch display. For comparison's sake, the HTC Touch Diamond2 has a 3.2-inch screen while the Touch HD's measures 3.8 inches. The P835's screen is definitely big enough for most purposes and has a screen resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, similar to other high-end Windows Mobile devices on the market now.

Under the screen is a row of touch-sensitive buttons which include a Windows Start key and an OK button to get out of menus quickly. Below them is a trackball for navigating the interface, which also acts as a selector when depressed. On the right side of the device is the microSD card slot and a camera shutter. On the left are the volume controls and a hold switch. As mentioned in earlier Asus handheld reviews, the hold switch is something we really like on a smartphone. This makes it easy to turn the screen off and lock the keys at the same time.

On the base of the P835 is a reset button you can poke at with the stylus tip and a single mini-USB port. Like many of the HTC devices, that's the only connector you'll find on this smartphone, which means it's used for charging, syncing and connecting a wired headset. So if you want to use a standard pair of headphones which utilize a 3.5mm audio jack, an optional adapter will be needed.

Features

Though it may not be the nicest-looking device around, the P835 makes up for that with an impressive list of features. Its cellular connectivity options include tri-band HSDPA and quad-band GSM. Other wireless options are Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS for navigation.

Memory-wise, aside from the option to increase the built-in storage using the microSD card slot, the P835 has 4GB already installed. So, right out of the box, you can start loading music and videos without worrying about space constraints. For running applications, it has 288MB of RAM, similar to what's found on HTC's high-end products like the Touch Diamond2 and Touch HD.

On the software side, Asus has included quite a number of applications with the P835. One of them is the Opera Mobile browser which renders Web pages much better than the default Internet Explorer. Others include Asus' own media management programs like EziMusic for tracks and EziPhoto for images. One of the most interesting ones is the Wi-Fi Sharing app. This connects the phone to your data plan and sends out a Wi-Fi signal so that up to 10 users can share your HSDPA connection at once. It's not a feature we think many will use often, but is useful to have.

Unfortunately, the user interface customizations performed by Asus don't seem to be as useful. The modified Home screen and Gester (finger-friendly scrolling) interface haven't been improved much from the P565 and still feel clunky compared to solutions like Spb Mobile Shell and HTC's TouchFlo. The AnyTime Launcher addon, for example, is supposed to make commonly used apps more accessible. But switching between categories of programs was not smooth and the entire experience just didn't feel like a significant improvement over the default Windows Mobile programs menu.

A 5-megapixel camera is found at the back of the P835. This comes with autofocus but not an LED for lighting up subjects. The shots taken were of reasonable quality, but as with most smartphone cameras, don't expect a miracle if you want to print them out.

Performance

Because Asus went with the Qualcomm MSM7201A processor in the P835, the maximum clock speed of the device is 528MHz. This feels like a step back from the 800MHz processor found in the P565, though this new device does have a lot more RAM, which we thought that might make up for the shortcoming. Unfortunately, it didn't.

While the P835 wasn't very sluggish, the P835 didn't feel particularly responsive, either. Default Windows Mobile applications loaded fast but not the custom Home screen, which will be used quite a bit since it's the first thing you see when you turn it on. The Gester interface, which lets you pan and scroll screens with the finger, would sometimes stop responding to our finger pushes when moving within lists--an inconvenient annoyance. We definitely expected more considering the large amount of RAM available.

Voice and video calls worked well. The speakerphone feature was sufficiently loud and we could hear those on the other end of the call quite clearly. Battery life was less than perfect, just slightly over a day on a single charge of the 1,100mAh battery. Those who make many calls will surely have to charge it every night, or even bring an extra battery to last a whole day.

Conclusion

In trying to make the P835 better, we can't help but feel that Asus has made it worse compared with its earlier products. On paper, the features that should make it an attractive product are all there. But in our actual use, the parts didn't come together to bring about a cohesive experience. This could potentially be solved in a future firmware update, but with the Garmin-Asus partnership coming up, we expect the company to have limited resources to make it's P835 much better.

Perhaps for that reason, it's not such a bad thing that Asus will be selling the P835 in only a few Asia-Pacific countries. These are Hong Kong, Taiwan, India and Malaysia. The company cannot confirm at this point if there will be an upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.5 later this year. But if you ask us, it doesn't matter. For its features, the price of the P835 can't be beat. However, unless you have the technical know-how and time to customize the phones with third-party apps such as Spb Mobile Shell or prefer to use the default Windows Mobile interface, we would suggest skipping this model in favor of others from brands like HTC and Samsung, or even earlier Asus models, for that matter.