Before their deal with Garmin was finalized earlier this year, Asus made a short-lived attempt at their own cell phone line. The last one from that futile effort was a touchscreen Windows Mobile handset that’s currently available in unlocked form, called the Asus P835.
Physically, the phone’s design looks a bit dated, lacking much of the sleek details that more popular smartphones are usually fitted with. Despite that, the phone feels particularly solid, with a good weight and sturdy build. It sports a large 3.5-inch display, with an 800 x 480 pixel resolution. Physical controls are decent, capped off by a trackball, which comes very handy when navigating the UI. Touch interface, unfortunately, is prone to lagging.
Asus threw in a good range of features for this phone, which makes it sort of attractive, despite the decidedly unappetizing custom home screen they outfitted the Windows Mobile base. It offers a full range of connectivity options, for instance, including tri-band HSDPA, quad-band GSM, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
It comes preinstalled with a number of useful apps, including a Wi-Fi Sharing facility that allows you to open up your phone’s 3G connection to as many as 10 users at a time. The phone itself is running on 288MB of RAM, which should help prop up the operation speed a little bit. Other features include a 5-megapixel camera (average quality), a GPS tuner, a media player with a wide range of codec support and microSD expansion (with a 4GB card bundled in the box).
Voice and video calls worked well on the phone, including pretty nifty performance from the speakerphone. Typing on the onscreen keyboard is about standard for what you expect from a WinMo phone – usable, but not perfect.
Overall, Asus P835 is a decent touchscreen effort. With a very attractive price point (between $450 to $550, depending where you find it), it also seems like a bargain for the hardware capability. There’s no way it’s going to go up against majority the of touch-based smartphones on the market, though.
