14 DAY TRIAL // Asus M930, announced more than a month ago to be a tough competitor for the Nokia E90 Communicator, will be commercially available at the beginning of 2008, for a price that is unknown yet. Several real photos of the handset recently appeared on the Internet, showing us that the handset is really capable of standing beside Nokia E90.
Presented as Asus M930W, although on the front case there's only the "M930" name, the device is a tri-band GSM phone (900 / 1800 / 1900 Mhz) that supports EDGE, GPRS, 3G and HSDPA, thus allowing fast data transfers (up to 3.6 Mb per second). As all the latest Asus smartphones, the M930 has a powerful processor, a Marvel PXA27x 520 Mhz one, considerably more powerful than Nokia E90's processor, which only has 330 Mhz.
The phone has two displays, an external and an internal one, features touchscreen capabilities and comes with a nice design that allows users to open it at both 90 and 180 degrees. It packs a nice 3.2 Megapixel camera with auto focus, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0 and EDR, 128 Mb of RAM and 256 MB ROM. Furthermore, Asus M930 offers Mini USB port and MicroSD card support, to boost the internal memory.
Unfortunately, the handset doesn't have GPS capabilities and this may be considered a drawback by some users. Another disadvantage may be represented by the internal screen: although its exact size is unknown, it is kind of small, clearly smaller than the internal display of Nokia E90, which has 4 inches and a 800 x 352 pixels resolution.
I think the battle between Asus M930 and Nokia E90 will be, first of all, a matter of OS preferences, since the Asus handset is powered by Windows Mobile 6 and Nokia E90 runs on Symbian. While on the paper things look quite good for Asus M930, we have to wait and see how the device works in reality and only then we will know if it can or cannot be considered better than the Nokia Communicator.
