A decade ago, this smartphone could have been the fastest PC on earth; Asus's P565 has a 800MHz CPU, the Marvell TavorP, which also brings back from the dead, the expression "Personal Digital Assistant" or PDA (ed: Remember those?).
The P565 is a bog standard touchscreen smartphone that is powered by Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6.1 OS, together with 256MB worth of flash memory and 128MB of RAM.
Also on the feature list is Asus's answer to Apple's smooth graphics user interface, the Glide, which should enable users to switch rapidly between tasks and applications either using a tap, a slide or a flick of their fingers.
The device also comes with a 3-megapixel digital camera with Autofocus, a 2.8-inch screen capable of displaying 640x480 pixels (that's VGA) as well as WiFi b/g, Bluetooth and HSDPA compatibility plus a GPS, a microSD slot (that can add another 32GB worth of storage in there).
Asus has bundled Microsoft Mobile Office as well as a business card recognition application with this PDA which makes good use of the cameraphone.
However the P565 is bound to lose some cookie points due to its poor battery life (3 hours talk time on 3G and 4 hours only on 2G).
Asus has yet to announce a launch date or give more details about the P565's pricing.
A decade ago, your top of the range computer would feature a Pentium II running at 400MHz, with 64MB memory and 12GB hard disk drive. It would come with 8MB video and Windows 98. All for around $2250.
Have you read these related articles?
Newsletter:
