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great phone - very stable OS, fast gps, long battery life, great design

Apr 29, 2008

Rating: 9 out of 10 (Spectacular)
Pros: jog wheel is very usful, very long battery life (except when wifi is on)
Cons: vga screen is not enabled; WM6.1 version is not yet available
Opinion:
I purchased the ASUS P750 in April 2008 for HK$4300 and have used it for about three weeks now. I have not had any trouble with the hangs or bugs that another reviewer here reported. SMS, Caller ID, 3G phone (autoswitching to 2G network when necessary) all works seemlessly and very stable (I have not had to do any soft reset in 3 weeks apart from after having to uninstall and reinstall mapking because of a bug in registration int he version that came on cd: mapking resolved the issue by letting me download the latest version of their program). The numeric keypad is definitely a useful design feature and was the reason why this won over the touch cruise or others.

Instead the phone works great - the price I paid included an extra HK$200 for a mapking bundle, which is really useful for gps navigation in my car (it takes a few minutes to acquire a fix of the satellites but after that it is very fast responding, immediately reacquiring lock eg after exiting undersea tunnel).
I also use it with microsoft reader (screen is too small for long reading) and tcpmp media player for multimedia files. The bundled software from asus is quite useful for really closing programs, so the 64MB RAM is actually quite enough for several programs like mapking, email, reader all running simultaneously.

Bad points: 1. there is only a 2.5mm headphone output instead of the standard 3.5mm one .2. WIFI drains battery much too quickly (battery meter drops 30% in one hour of wifi, so you can't leave wifi on for skype calls when you are in your own office wireless network area) compared to my ipaq and there is definitely improvement to be had in the power management for wifi. Otherwise the battery life is good (it goes several days without needing charging and battery drops only 7% if it is left on phone standby overnight) if you use only phone and gps for under an hour each day). In Hong Kong it came with a second battery but I have not bothered to charge it yet since it is not really needed. Another gripe is the fact that the screen is vga but asus only provides qvga output for it. Another feature that would have been useful would be to have a key for speakerphone function (instead of requiring user to touch the screen)

Overall I am very pleased with this smartphone. It is samall and light enough to carry everywhere and as a gps phone its battery life is much better than Nokia N95.