Product Name: ASUS P320
Price: £194.35
Supplied by: Clove
Reviewer: Shaun McGill
It’s day two of my time with the ASUS P320 and it has been quite an interesting ride. I can’t get the price out of my head, but that does not mean I will give it undue praise where it is not deserved.
General Performance
Turning off the default ASUS today software makes a big difference to general performance, but we still only have a 200 Mhz processor here. Surprisingly it works very well for the majority of tasks and only when multiple applications are running at once can it slow down a little. I mentioned last week how the HTC Touch Pro2 struggled to scroll through long lists of files on my old BlackBerry expansion card- the P320 has no such problems which is a little strange.
Memory is sparse, as can be seen by the screenshot, so it is recommended to use the included task manager to ensure that apps are closed fully before opening new ones.
Video playback is fairly smooth and I managed to run all third party apps I tried without issue. This is far from a powerhouse smartphone, but it does suffice for almost all normal tasks.
Camera
The camera is rated at 2MP and is pretty basic. It can take decent snaps in good lighting, but it is a bit hit and miss to say the least. Without a flash and no auto-focus it is difficult to capture what you need to.
Video recording is limited to 176×144 pixels which is very low indeed and the results are also quite poor. I would say that a camera is always a good inclusion in any smartphone, but the P320 could break that rule for me…
Media
The included headphones look very cheap, but work very well. We are not talking about iPod sound quality here, but for movie watching they are more than adequate. They also have a unique shape which seemed to pit in my ears very well, something almost every other stereo headset on the market fails to do.
As I said earlier movie watching is smooth and crisp, but of course the small screen is not ideal for long movies. This is not designed to be a media-centric smartphones, but it is able to cope for occasional use and is far from poor in this area.
Call Quality
I wasn’t expecting much here because of the P320’s small size and the voice quality takes me back to the older i-mates which used to suffer from distortion at high volume levels. To be fair the quality is very good at normal level and it is very loud which is unusual. The speakerphone is also better than expected, but does tend to lose quality at high volumes.
Signal quality is OK and I had no issues, but with no 3G I wasn’t expecting any. All in all the voice side is better than expected.
Battery
Battery life is not too bad under general use, but it would seem that a charge will still be needed each day. This is surprising given the small screen and lack of 3G, but it is early days and these things tend to need a few charges to bed in.
Wi-Fi use does create a hit though and one hour of surfing took the meter down to 60%. As I said it is early days, but the main point is that the battery copes well enough for standard usage.
Software extras
There are some software extras included which will be of use to some users. There seems to be a scattergun approach to what is included though, but all of the staple Windows Mobile software is there so look on these as extras.
Remote Calendar is designed to enable synchronisation with a Google calendar account, GPS Catcher is a small tool to speed up obtaining a GPS signal and Newstation is the expected RSS software for news.
Conclusion
It is not easy deciding what to think of the P320. It is extremely well priced and you get functionality that would not necessarily be expected at the price, but you also get a device which feels like the components are from a smartphone from a couple of years ago. As a first Windows Mobile device, a backup or for GPS navigation I can only conclude that it is excellent value for money though and worth a punt.
Build Quality- 8
Ease of use- 7
Battery- 7
Screen clarity- 6
Value for money- 8
Total score- 79%
Available from Clove for £194.35
I wonder if the screen is big enough for gps navigation?
I also wondered if it might be suitable for kids actually, load up a few astraware games and they’d be happy. Probably not the coolest phone in the school though!
The screen is small, but would just suffice for GPS. The kids may like it, but again the screen may play a part here.
whats the recommended size for a memory card?
i first read that it supported only upto 2 gb. but found it worked with an 8 gb card as well. though the videos played with a slight lag.
i want to get an 8 gb card. but is there any way to eliminate the lag in the videos ? the (frame per second) fps?