Asus has brought up their full line-up of PDA phones and the P525 is a PDA with a number pad, sometimes of a rarity. Its a touch screen running Windows Mobile 5 and the charcoal grey that made the P525 such a good looker makes another appearance. The P525 is a beautiful beast, all smokey gray with chrome buttons down the side panel in sharp contrast. We also liked the screen-crisp, clear and good contrast, visible even in direct sunlight.
The number keys look like sculpted buttons that have been integrated into the body. They give just the right amount of feedback when used, and never feel tacky.We don’t like the joystick though; its too small and smooth and theres insufficient tactile feedback. We also didn’t like the fact that the joysctick’s in between the number keys 2 and 5. this affects access to the number 2.
Voice commander makes another appearance, a really excellent piece of code, this-that allows you to do so much more with the voice commands. The excellent business card scanner is also preinstalled. Theres also a password protected security application called My Secrets that allows you to protect your files by encrypting them. All the usual Windows Mobile applications are present as well.
There is a dedicated button for the camera, which is surprisingly good for a PDA. The volume button is very ergonomic, as is the hold button which prevents keypad, button and screen use.
While the loud speaker offers decent volume, we lament the volume levels on the hands free kit, its just too low, be it music or a voice call. While on the topic of calls, signal quality could have been better, a parent weakness of most of the PDAs. If you need a good phone, please look elsewhere.
Where the P525 scores is in PDA functionality (even though it forgoes a QWERTY keypad), looks nobody will disagree here and, of course, the software package that improves productivity by quite an extent. At $500 the ASUS P525 is a good PDA, but a strictly avarage phone. Its flashy for sure, and will draw glances anywhere. You’ll have to decide what is more important to you – PDA features or just a Mobile Phone.

Popularity: 18% [?]

The Samsung F700 is a touch screen/sensitive phone with a QWERTY keyboard which can slide out when tilting the phone counter-clockwise. If you feel that you don’t want to use the QWERTY keyboard you can use the touch screen instead. Double clicking on a text area will bring up a virtual keyboard which includes T9 support and is layed out exactly the same as previous Samsung phones. Problem with using this is that to start off with you will find yourself touching extra characters by mistake till you get used to it. At first texting with the QWERTY keyboard takes longer than on a normal device but once your used to it you wont be going back to the normal way of writing things.
There are cameras situated on both sides of the phone to allow for 3G video calls, no protective slide protecting the lenses though. The main camera is a 3.15 MP camera that produces images up to a resolution of 2048×1536 pixels and next to it you will find a flash. The camera on the front of the device is a bog standard VGA camera with no flash.
On the front of the device there is only one button which when pressed brings up your shortcuts. On the right hand side of the device you will find volume controls, camera button and a slidey type button that is used to lock the keypad. On top of the device there is the power button and flap which when pulled to the side will reveal the power socket and socket for hands free/headphones. The device can support memory cards which are located under the back cover along with battery and sim card. With my phone i was given an additional back plate so you may also get this if you purchase your phone. My back plate hasnt scratched up yet so i have not yet to use it. The speakers and mic are hidden at the top and bottom of the front of the phone respectively but i reckon these will gather a lot of dust and cleaning them could be hard unless you have some compressed air to clean them out once in a while.
The main menu is shown as a 3 x 4 grid with a cross hair which you can drag around to get to the icon you wish to select. Hovering over icons displays the name of the icon making it easy to find the place you want to get to. Unfortunately there are no additional themes/skins with this phone and your stuck with the dark background with light text.
The touch screen itself is pretty responsive but there has been times where i’ve had to click a number of times to get it doing what i want it to do. I put this down to my finger not being in the right place rather than the phone not registering something is being pressed. Samsung has added a nice feature where the phone vibrates when you click on things and the level of vibration can be changed or turned off completely. This is called VibeTonz Technology if you wanted to search for it for more info. Continue reading →

Popularity: 17% [?]

The N95 8GB takes the best phone in the world and makes it better! Difficult to believe? Well, you better believe it.
The list of features on the N95 8GB is quite endless – Assisted Global Positioning System (A-GPS) with voice navigation, Nokia Maps, an excellent 5 Megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optical lense, push email, quick search, LifeBlog and MBlog, Reading Office suite (word, excel, powerpoint, PDF and even Zip) files, tons of local content, including Movies. And like the earlier N95, the two way slider with access to the gallery, maps and internet bookmarks with one slide. Thankfully the media buttons have been raised compare to the early N95 making them easier to use. Even the main buttons on the front of the phone are bigger.
On the N95 8GB a better battery is provided. So, despite the fact that the N95 8GB comes with a bigger and brighter 2.8 inch 16 million color QVGA screen, there is improved talktime and standby time. Of course, putting all this in has made it a wee bit bulkier.
Coming with class leading storage of 8GB, it allowes you to store as many as 2000 regular mp3 songs or over 5000 songs in optimized eAAC+ format used by Nokia Music Manager on PC Suite.
In our opinion, this is more than a multimedia phone. Its a ‘Personal Convergence Companion’, because you won’t need a separate camera, or a top notch music player, or a navigation system. Heck, the N95 8GB even allowes you to sacrifies your personal computer, complemented with a bluetooth keyboard (available as an accessory for purchase), QuickOffice Pro (available as an accessory for purchase), and Wireless LAN (Wi-Fi) for high speed internet access and email.
Beside work, we did play hard as well, Downloading videos from YouTube and listening music through our own headphones (thanks to the 3.5mm audio jack) kept us busy. This isn’t a phone with additional features, its actually a computer which also has a very good mobie phone.

Popularity: 33% [?]