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By Damian Koh
May 06, 2008

If you thought you were looking at the Nokia E90 when you first beheld the Asus M930, you are not alone. Its passing resemblance to the Finnish's QWERTY clamshell aside, the M930 also carries some hints of the Taiwan-based company's first Eee PC.

Design

Design is what the Asus M930 is touting, though it may not be entirely for the right reason. Its uncanny resemblance to the Nokia E90 Communicator may invite comments like copycat, though the M930 is slightly more compact at 53 x 112 x 18mm with a heft that's evenly distributed across the body.

To put that into perspective, the size of the M930's footprint lies somewhere between the E90 and the HTC S730. In our hands, the review unit feels very solid and well-built and it comes to mind that the M930 could double as a weapon when the situation calls for it.

Our first few moments with the phone had us feeling that the buttons on the numeric keypad were a little stiff. Although the ridge-like contour makes it possible to distinguish the keys when blind typing, we found the button "2" too close to the bottom edge of the directional pad. True enough, this resulted in accidental presses.

The layout style is the standard fare with the usual call/end buttons, Home key and backspace taking up the bottom half of the phone. The earpiece grill sits above the 2-inch QVGA screen, while the power button is found to its left. Elsewhere, we can find the 2.5mm audio jack and mini-USB port along the bottom edge of the handset, microSD expansion card slot to the right, and a 2-megapixel camera module at the back.

One of the reasons the M930 is frequently mentioned in the same breath as the E90 Communicator is because of its QWERTY clamshell form factor. Like the latter, the M930 also props up at an angle with the internal screen facing the user when the phone is open. There's a secondary VGA camera for video calls on the top right corner.

However, the size of the LCD (2.6-inch WQVGA, 400 x 240-pixel) is nowhere near comparable to Nokia's 4-inch, 800 x 352-pixel one. We felt it's an awful waste of space, and frankly, if you compare it with the external 2-inch panel, you are actually not getting a lot more screen estate. There can be several reasons for this decision and one of them could be that programs built to run on WM6 may not cater to a wider-resolution display, hence the cap on the size.

The full QWERTY keyboard is great for thumbing, though if you place it on the desk, you'll probably find it hard to touch-type using your fingertips. We also noticed that the M930, when open, doesn't sit firmly on our desk as only three corners are in contact with the surface of the table. It's not a big issue, but it's one that mitigates the phone's solid build quality.

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