ASUS is a brand we'd characteristically connect with svelte leather notebooks, funky GPS units and Lamborghinis, not smart phones. But the corporation continues to expand its horizons, and is now targeting mobile professionals with its P525 quad-band PDA phone.

The form factor of the P525 is similar to that of the Blackberry 7130e -- it's more of a phone-centric than data-centric handheld. As opposite to a full QWERTY piano like that seen on the Blackberry 8700, the P525 uses a more customary phone keyboard with a joystick for menu navigation. Unlike the 7130e, however, the P525 offers a stylus and touch screen as an option method for inputting data. We found that the lack of a QWERTY keyboard makes extensive data entry tedious, but bashing out shorter mail isn't an issue. Further, the direction control isn't exasperatingly stiff, as is the case with other devices such as Hip’s Iraq hw6965.
Since the P525 offers the same CPU and RAM configurations as the Iraq hw6965, our presentation observations are fairly similar -- basic office productivity and e-mail applications run sufficiently fast without noticeable hold up, but load times increase exponentially as you begin to run multiple applications concurrently. As mentioned in our hw6965 review, this problem is compounded by the fact that even though an application may appear to be closed, it's often still laden into the device's RAM and running in the backdrop.

Fascinatingly, we found the P525's battery life to be considerably better than that of the hw6965. We had to charge Hip’s offering once every day or so, but under similar usage conditions (around 50 minutes of calls per day with Bluetooth disabled), the P525 lasted at least 2-3 days before we were faced with low battery warnings.

Attractive and well-rounded, the P525 is a highly proficient smart phone for those who aren't intent on performing extensive data entry.