By Damian Koh
06/05/2008
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/mobilephones/0,39051199,42565216p,00.htm

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.

Features

The M930 finds itself trapped between the E90 with a very strong suite of features and bulky, and the HTC S730 with its more compact form factor and customized software. Each has its own unique proposition, and users can either see the value of the M930 as either straddling that of the E90 and S730, or neither here nor there.

That said, the M930 is not without its merits. The tri-band GSM handset comes equipped with HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth stereo A2DP. A TI OMAP 2430 450MHz processor powers the Windows Mobile 6 Standard operating system with 64MB of RAM (23MB available) for running your applications and 256MB (138MB available) for storage. We would love to have more RAM on the M930, so even though the Asus has a faster processor compared with the E90, it loses out in terms of multitasking capabilities to the latter which has twice the RAM.

On the user interface, some manufacturers have taken the extra step to customize the software to be more user-friendly. Examples are those on the O2 products and recently HTC and MWg. The software on our M930 review unit comes in the standard WM6 flavor and nothing to rave about. What's goog to know is that the Taiwanese company plans to launch the same phone in the latest WM6.1 OS sometime in mid-June. So that's something to look out for.

As with the WM6 Standard edition, you won't be able to create Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents out-of-the-box. Asus ships the M930 with the ClearVue version of these programs in addition to a PDF reader. It is a pity because with a QWERTY keyboard, we expected more productivity suites to ship with the handset.

The M930 comes with a fixed-focus 2-megapixel camera module. That's generally fine for basic snapshots, but without autofocus or any onboard flash, its usefulness is limited. White balance tends to be on the cooler side for outdoor shots and shutter lag measured 0.8 second in our tests.

Performance

With a 450MHz processor and 64MB RAM, the M930 runs rather smoothly, though it did toil a little during multitasking and video playback. The 1,100mAh battery gave us about 2.5 days on a single charge with a combined use of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth stereo A2DP, on top of calls and text messages. Its rated talktime is 5 hours.

The onboard speakerphone was sufficiently loud during our review, which was important for video calls where the phone was placed on a desk and the user approximately 20 to 30cm away. There's no front-facing camera on the top face of the phone for video calls, though. In addition, you probably have to squint at the external LCD if you are using the phone outdoors under direct sunlight as the screen appeared washed-out to us.

Final Thoughts

On the one hand, we would like to say we like the M930 for its well-rounded suite of features, but it bothers us that there are alternatives (some probably better) out there. The E90 and the HTC S730 are models we have made several mentions of in our review. The M930 takes the middle ground between those two handsets, and may appeal to some people. Although if you could wait for it to ship with WM6.1, that might give this phone the extra edge it needs over its competitors.