Asus P527

Already well known for its laptops, PC components, and peripherals, Asus is adding yet another tech category to its growing portfolio mobile phones. The company's first model, the P527, offers an enticing array of features including Wi-Fi connectivity and GPS, to name two but a number of debilitating performance caveats make this unlocked model hard to recommend, especially considering its $550 price.

The candy bar style P527 boasts an attractive silver aluminum body that, at 4.5x2.3x0.6 inches, is a bit smaller than Apple's iPhone. The phone's display is smaller as well. The 2.6 inch touch screen TFT can display 65.000 colors at a 240x320 resolution. That's sharp and bright enough for viewing photos and videos, but it's a bit too cramped to navigate comfortably the phone's menu icons using your finger. What's more, trying to type on the tiny onscreen keyboard that pops up for Web surfing is simply hopeless.

Asus includes a thin, cheap feeling plastic stylus that stores in a slot on the bottom of the phone. (Considering the P527's steep price, we wish the company would provide a metal stylus instead.) Rounding out the design features are an alpha numeric keypad and eight hot keys that offer one touch access to various applications.

The P527 is certainly not wanting in terms of features. The phone runs the Windows Mobile 6 Professional OS and supports three flavors of wireless connectivity : GSM/EDGE, Bluetooth 2.0, and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. There's no 3G network support, however.

Asus conveniently includes a wireless manager that you can use to turn on or off any of the three wireless radios from one screen. You also get a 2 megapixel camera that can record video a microSD/SDHC card slot; an FM tuner (the antenna is built in to a set of wired earbuds that come with the phone) and support for music, photo, and video playback. Corporate users will appreciate extras like a business card scanner, as well as mobile versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook and more that come standard with the Windows Mobile OS.

Perhaps the most notable feature, however, is the inclusion of a SiRF Star III GPS chipset. Paired with the Asus Go application (which loads from an included 2GB microSD card), the receiver turns the P527 into a full fledged GPS navigator, complete with spoken turn by turn directions and a robust point of interest library. You also get some interesting supplementary programs that add even more functionality. One such app, called Location Courier, sends your GPS location information to other parties at set intervals via text messages.

A Travelog function, meanwhile, allows you to attach images taken with the camera phone to your route you can later upload the information to Google Earth to create a visual representation of your travels. Overall, we found the GPS mapping software worked well and was intuitive to use, but some of the maps seemed out of date. For example, though our Texas neighborhood has been around for nearly four years, it didn't show up on the maps provided by Asus.

In fact, the GPS system put our location on a road that we had never heard of before. And while the spoken directions are clear, they could use more volume. However, our biggest caveat with the P527 was speed. Thanks to its low end 200MHz TI OMAPTM 850 CPU and mere 64MB of RAM (the bare minimum needed to run the Windows Mobile Pro OS), the phone was painfully slow at start up and when opening or closing an application.

Things practically grinded to a halt when we had several apps running at once. The situation wasn't much better when surfed the Net: Web browsing using AT&T's EDGE network was much slower than when we used the iPhone's Safari browser. Unfortunately, speeds didn't improve much when we switched to a Wi-Fi connection.