Asus P527 Smartphone for North America

The P527 is a Windows Mobile Professional smartphone that comes equipped with high end features like an auto-focus camera and GPS navigation. It also features one rather rare and practical feature for a touchscreen based Windows Mobile device: a traditional alphanumeric phone keypad.

Its brushed metal front face is beautifully accented by its silver keypad and joystick, and the gray soft-touch surface found on the back of the phone, which surrounds the elegantly designed auto-focus camera, is both practical and attractive. In fact, all of the surfaces of the P527 seem very practical in that they offer a good feel yet stay remarkable free of fingerprints.

It has a reasonable weight of 132g (4.7oz), and measures up at a very pocketable 114mm x 58mm x 16mm (4.5" x 2.3" x .6").

Core functions

The quad-band GSM/EDGE Asus P527 works remarkably well as a regular phone for a Windows Mobile Professional device, thanks in large part to its keypad. But the P527 also offers fine reception on the 1900MHz frequency band, and has good audio characteristics in general, including a very solid speakerphone function. The P527's battery also seems up to the task, managing a solid 7.5 hours of talk time, and surviving pretty well for a device that sports energy draining features like GPS.

Like all Windows Mobile smartphones, the P527 has an excellent contacts system that can store all sorts of useful bits of information. The addition of the keypad on the P527 makes accessing contacts a simple task, as users merely have to start entering a contact's name on the keypad to see a list of matching records. A space can even be added to allow for searching on both the first and last name at the same time. A speed dial number can be defined for a contact for easy one-press dialing, and the very powerful Voice Commander system can be used for speaker-independent voice dialing or for accessing any number of phone features.

Unlike most Windows Mobile 6 Professional devices, the P527 has a somewhat normal profiles function, which can easily be accessed by an included Today screen plug-in. Users can not define new profiles, but at least they can easily choose between normal, vibrate, silent, and automatic profiles. The automatic profile switches between normal and meeting modes based on the appointments in the phone's calendar.

The Asus P527 supports text and MMS messaging out of the box, but does not come with any pre-installed instant messaging support other than Microsoft's own MSN Messenger client. Like most smartphones, the P527 can be used to access IMAP or POP based email accounts. Thanks to Microsoft's Direct Push technology, the P527 can also be linked up to an Exchange server for push based email, contacts, and calendar updates in real time, over the air.

The Asus P527 lacks 3G support, but does offer built-in WiFi capabilities. If EDGE data speeds are adequate for users, they do have the option to use the phone as a modem thanks to built-in internet connection sharing. The P527 can use Bluetooth or USB to connect with other devices, including stereo headphones, and even supports a USB card reader mode for accessing the microSD card slot without the need for ActiveSync. Lastly, the P527 has a nice auto-configure applet that can take care of the problems associated with configuring network APNs and connections when using the device with a U.S. carrier.

Multimedia / Applications

The Asus P527 ships with a solid assortment of multimedia functions and pre-installed applications. The built-in 2 megapixel camera has an auto-focus lens and takes reasonably good quality snapshots.

All Windows Mobile smartphones come equipped with the Windows Media Player for video and audio playback. It can organize music by artist, album, and genre, and can even create playlists on the phone. It can also be synchronized with MTP compatible application on a PC, such as Winamp. The P527's Bluetooth system supports stereo connections, which means that user can enjoy music with or without wires. If one wishes to use the built-in FM radio, though, the included wired headset is mandatory since it acts as the radio's antenna.

Other nice software included on the P527 includes the Asus Zip Manager, a nice backup program, and the Newstation RSS feed reader.

The real interesting apps on the P527 are all location based, though. For starters, the GPS Catcher app appears to download hints for the GPS system that work similarly to the way A-GPS devices do. The GPS Catcher needs to be updated every 3 days or so, and can be configured to update automatically. The Travellog app lets users track where they travel easily, and the LocationCourier program sends the phone's position to a contact via SMS.

Both of those apps are handy, but the big gun in the P527's GPS arsenal is the included Asus GO navigation software. This app offers very flexible and powerful navigation. It can be configured for portrait or landscape display modes, automatically switches to night mode, and has a large POI database. Go has a pedestrian mode for walkers, and it produces amazingly clear voice prompts when running. Since Go is far too large for the P527's 128MB of internal storage, the system ships on an included 2GB microSD card, 1.7GB of which is used for the mapping data and application itself.

User Interface

The Asus P527 runs the Windows Mobile 6 Professional OS and user interface. While originally designed primarily for use with a stylus, WM6 Pro has become more usable single-handedly over time thanks to a better array of buttons and controls on many of the devices. P527 users will still need to whip out the stylus from time to time, but most will find that it is not all that necessary for most common tasks, which is a good thing.

Asus offers a few of its own goodies for the P527, like a few Today screen plug-ins. The Today screen is the standby screen on a WM device, and it supports plug-ins that can be configured to list things like unread messages and upcoming appointments. Asus included a couple of its own plug-ins for the P527, such as the profiles plug-in and the finger friendly ASUS GO activation plug-in.

Asus has further tried to improve usability on the P527 by offering up its own menu system, which it calls Asus Launcher. Asus Launcher is a good looking menu system that the user calls up by pressing the left softkey on the Today screen. The menus can be navigated with the joystick or jog-wheel, but are more quickly run through using the phone's keypad, something that doesn't work for the standard WM6 Start menu. The menus can be reorganized as needed, but don't support user created folders. The only real problem is that the OK button closes the app instead of going back to the previous menu. As such, the left softkey has to be used for that, and its position doesn't make that very convenient when using the scroll wheel. But all in all, Asus Launcher is a nice addition to Windows Mobile.

Two other Asus add-ons are the Mode Switcher and the Asus Cleaner. The Mode Switcher is an applet that is accessed by holding down the bottom left corner key on the keypad. Depending on how it is configured, the applet either displays a list of currently running apps or a user defined list of apps that can be quickly launched. My only complaint is that Internet Explorer is not listed as an available option for some reason. Asus Cleaner is a settings applet that allows running apps to be truly closed, not just minimized, when the screen's upper right corner X button is pressed. It can be set to close apps with a long or short press, and it supports listing apps that should be exempt from being force closed.

Conclusion

For a company just entering the North American market, Asus has put together an extremely solid offering with the P527. The P527 is very modern looking, has an outstanding feature set that includes GPS and an auto-focus camera, and offers something that few Windows Mobile touchscreen devices do - a traditional phone keypad.
It does have a few shortcomings, though. A lack of 3G support is sure to be a turn-off for road warriors, and the joystick doesn't always behave the way it should, but P527 tis stil one of the most enjoyable and phone-like WM6 Professional devices on the market.