14 DAY TRIAL // After making a solid impression back in March, during CeBIT 2008, Asus has been very quiet when it comes to new mobile devices. Recently, however, the Taiwanese manufacturer (which is mainly known for its motherboards, graphics cards and notebooks) has presented a brand new Pocket PC – Asus P552w.
The P552w leverages on an Asus-developed Gester (not Gesture) technology and it's the first handset to feature the 3D touch-responsive Glide interface. This should allow users to navigate through the handset's menus "through simple flicks of their fingers."
The full list of features that Asus P552w comes with unveils the following: a 2.8 TFT touchscreen display with 240 x 320 pixels and 65K colors, Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, internal GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, push email, Web browser, office document viewer and editor, EziPhoto and EziMusic, Anytime Launcher, Asus Today, a 2 Megapixel camera with video recording, a Marvell Tavor processor that runs at 624MHz, 256MB of Flash, 128MB of DDRAM and microSD / microSDHC card support. The built-in GPS of P552w will work together with Google Maps, although these are available only for the following countries: Taiwan, China, Russia, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Belgium.
Unfortunately for North American mobile users, the new Asus only works on European and Asian frequency bands, bringing tri-band GSM connectivity (900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz) with GPRS and EDGE, and HSDPA 2100 connectivity (for data transfer speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps). Thus, unless Asus launches a version of the P552w especially made for North America, the handset will surely not be released on that side of the world.
For a Pocket PC, the P552w is both lightweight and slim, weighing 105 grams and measuring 102 x 60.5 x 14.5 millimeters. The handset includes a battery that should provide up to 3 hours of 3G talk-time / 5 hours of 2G talk-time or up to 300 hours of 3G stand-by time / 250 hours of 2G stand-by time.
Asus did not mention when its new and pretty cool P552w would be available, but the company said we should be able to buy it in two color versions: black and white. Not word yet on the Pocket PC's price, but it's highly probable that it will be quite a hefty one.
