14 DAY TRIAL // Asus P320, one of the smallest Pocket PCs on the market, was launched yesterday in Taiwan, Asus' home country, which has more than 22 million mobile subscribers.
Already available in some European countries, the stylish Asus P320 was first unveiled at the beginning of March, during CeBIT 2008, together with other Asus handsets (including the unique Lamborghini ZX1).
Weighing 105 grams and measuring 99 x 55 x 13.35 millimeters, the P320 is very small when compared to most of the other Windows Mobile devices. Despite this, Asus managed to pack in the device a series of very nice features, including: internal GPS, a 2.6 inch touchscreen display with 240 x 320 pixels and 65K colors, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, a 2 Megapixel camera with auto focus, push email, USB, microSD and microSDHC card support, a 200 MHz Ti OMAP processor, 128MB of Flash memory and 64MB of RAM. The handset runs on Windows Mobile 6.1, bringing applications like Office Mobile (create and edit Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents), Windows Media player, organizer, file manager, to-do list and so on.
Maybe the single drawback of P320 is the fact that it's not 3G-enabled, supporting only quad-band GSM frequencies (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900) with GPRS and EDGE.
Asus P320 has a retail price of 11,990 TWD, meaning about 395 USD - quite affordable for a Pocket PC. The device is now available across Taiwan through various retail stores and channels, most probably in two color versions: black and pink.
According to DigiTimes, Asus intends to sell at least 20,000 units of its new P320 in Taiwan, and at least 200,000 units on all the markets from Asia Pacific. Considering the good price-quality balance of the handset, I think the company has all the chances to achieve these goals.