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ASUS MyPal A716 Windows Mobile 2003 Pocket PC with WiFi and BluetoothPosted June 3, 2004 by Lisa Gade, Editor in Chief You won't find too many PDAs with both WiFi and Bluetooth built in: the higher end Dell Axim X30 models, HP iPAQ 4150, iPAQ 5555 and Sony Clié UX50 are currently your only choices. The ASUS MyPal A716 not only offers dual wireless but it ups the ante with its CF slot. Yes, you can buy a CF sleeve for the iPAQ 5555, but that's an expensive package, with the handheld alone selling for $650 and the sleeve adding another $50 or more. The A716 in contrast lists for only $450 with street prices even lower. The A716 is a power-user's Pocket PC with great benchmarks, a 400 MHz processor, 64 megs of RAM, dual expansion slots and dual wireless. It has a large battery that offers very good run times, and that battery is user replaceable. Though ASUS isn't a household name for PDAs (they're a well-respected motherboard manufacturer and make the slick S5Ne ultralight notebook we reviewed here), they're starting to make their presence known in the US. Later this year they'll even offer a VGA Pocket PC running Windows Mobile 2003 SE. And they'll be offering a free upgrade to Windows Mobile 2003 SE for the A716 on their web site soon.
Design and Ergonomics The ASUS A716 is a large Pocket PC that's close to the size of the iPAQ 5555 and Toshiba e805. But it's hard to pack all those features, especially the large CF slot in a tiny package. The WiFi antenna is mounted on the top right side of the unit and protrudes about 1/2". You'll find the standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack as well as the CF and SD card slots on the top edge. The ASUS MyPal A620 was popular with gamers thanks to its great graphics benchmarks and gamer-friendly buttons, and the A716 should also appeal thanks to ergonomic buttons and directional pad. The four application buttons are large and easy to press, while the circular d-pad moves fluidly in all directions and supports diagonals. The ASUS has enhanced button settings, which allow you to assign an application to a button (as do all Pocket PCs) but also allow you to assign another app or function to the same buttons when they're pressed and held. The enter button, up/down navigation buttons and IR windows are on the left side while the power jack in on the right. The user replaceable battery is located on the back, and locks in place with a switch on the unit's left side. There's also a backup battery on/off switch located under the battery. The mic is located on the bottom edge, next to the sync connector. LEDs above the display indicate wireless (the blue LED lights when either WiFi or Bluetooth is turned on), charging status and alarms. |
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In the Box
The MyPal comes with a USB cable, charger, cradle that can charge the unit with the standard or extended battery, a ballistic nylon case with belt clip and a software CD. You can plug the USB cable and charger into the cradle or directly into the Pocket PC.
Horsepower
The ASUS has an Intel XScale PXA255 processor running at 400 MHz. That's the standard processor used by high end Pocket PCs in 2003 into 2004. It's a fast performer, and as you can see from our benchmarks below, the A716 turns in some very impressive numbers. The unit feels fast and is up to the task of gaming and multimedia playback.
The unit has 64 megs of RAM with 55.79 available to the user. It has 64 megs of NAND Flash memory, 25 of which is available as persistent storage (the data in NAND will survive a hard reset). That's a healthy amount of memory for a Pocket PC in this price range, and you can expand it using SD and CF storage cards.
Screen, Sound, and Gaming
The ASUS has a 3.5" transflective display capable of displaying over 65,000 colors. This is a gorgeous display that rivals high end iPAQs. It's exceptionally bright, very contrasty and has excellent color saturation with no discernable color bias. I love it!
While sound from the built-in speaker won't wake the dead, it's adequate for alarms and movie playback. Sound quality and volume through the standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack is excellent. The ASUS Settings applet allows you to adjust mic sensitivity (or use auto gain control) and set the recording volume. You can also adjust playback volume, balance, treble and bass settings. That's a more full-featured set of controls than most Pocket PCs offer. The ASUS A620 has a great reputation as a gaming machine thanks to its very fast CPU and graphics performance and ergonomic buttons. A716 is also a speedy performer, and games played very well with the exception of two. Hexacto Bounty Hunter Pinball doesn't get along with the A716's buttons and is unplayable. Bust 'em was playable, but the game felt a little slow and jerky and the sound didn't work well. Bust 'em 2 did much better and plays well on the A716. Doom fans will be happy to know that gfDoom runs extremely well on the ASUS, as does Blade of Betrayal. Bluetooth Like the iPAQs and the wireless Dell Axim X30 models, the A716 uses the Widcomm drivers and Bluetooth stack. That's good news because the software is very user-friendly by Bluetooth standards and quite reliable. To use Bluetooth, simply tap on the Bluetooth icon on the taskbar. To create a new connection you'll use the wizard, which first has you select the type of device before you pair with that device. The ASUS supports the headset profile in addition to the standard profiles found on other Bluetooth enabled Pocket PCs (mobile phone, ActiveSync, Internet access point, other PDAs and more). The iPAQ 5555 and Dell Axim X30 wireless models are the only other Pocket PCs that support Bluetooth headsets, so if that's important to you, you'll should consider the ASUS when shopping for your new PDA. WiFi The A716 has built-in WiFi 802.11b wireless Ethernet networking. The WiFi antenna is located on the top right of the unit. While most Windows Mobile 2003 Pocket PCs rely on Microsoft's Connection Manager to manage WiFi connections, the A716 comes with a full-featured tool called WiFiME. This is a great bonus since Connection Manager has very few features and has been dumbed down to the point where it's not useful for doing more than making a basic connection to an access point. You can launch WiFiME from the Programs group, or you can access it from the taskbar where it's always resident. Tap in the taskbar house icon to turn the radio on and off, or manage a connection. You'll see a tabbed interface, with IP Config, Wireless, Survey, Profile, Statistics, Power and About tabs. The IP Config tab shows you info about your current connection (DHCP or static, IP address, MAC address, subnet mask, gateway, DNS) and has a Renew button. The Wireless tab shows connection state, base station ID, current channel, data rate, link quality and signal strength. The Survey tab shows access points within range, and provides their names, channel, BSSID and signal strength (it doesn't indicate whether the access points are using WEP). Networking power users will love this utility and even novices will find it helpful for troubleshooting connections. And of course it makes connecting to new access points when traveling much more simple.
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Above, the Bluetooth wizard, below the WiFiME site survey screen.
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