Asus P320

The launch of Windows Mobile 6.1 came and went at the beginning of April without too much fuss. The odd news story appeared here and there, but few people paid too much attention to this minor revision to Microsoft’s mobile operating system. Now that phones with the new mobile operating system are beginning to trickle out though, is that situation likely to change? Not if the Asus P320 is anything to go by...

This has nothing to do with the Asus P320 (formerly known as the Galaxy Mini) itself, but rather because you can count the number of new and significant features that Windows Mobile 6.1 brings on the fingers of one hand. And the biggest improvement, the radical Today screen revamp, with its fancy sliding panels, is absent on from Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional – only Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard gets this handy feature.

What you do get is the new “Getting Started” tool, but this is little more than a number of finger-sized shortcuts for such common tasks as setting up email accounts, Bluetooth headsets, and passwords. Hardly radical.

More interesting is the long overdue introduction of threaded text messaging. But while the ability to click a text message and see all recent messages between you and the recipient is welcome, it's nowhere near as slick as the iPhone's implementation with its speech bubbles and smoothly-scrolling screen. Microsoft's idea of interface design stretches only to colour-coded names and numbers here.

Another small but effective improvement is that you can now zoom in and out of pages in Internet Explorer Mobile, just as you can in the excellent Opera Mini browser. But elsewhere it's pretty much standard Windows Mobile 6 fare – the interface is still just as fiddly as before.

So, if Windows Mobile 6.1 is a bit of a let down, we won’t let this cloud our judgement of the Asus P320 itself, because the it’s actually quite a nice device. It's not available to buy just yet (the scheduled launch date is "summer 2008"), but when it does hit the shelves, it'll be the slimmest, sleekest and most pocket-friendly Windows Mobile smartphone phone you've ever seen.

The Asus P320 is a mere 13.4mm thick, with a 55 x 100mm footprint – smaller than the iPhone – and weighs a featherweight 105g. It's nicely designed too, with a soft touch plastic rear panel, chrome trim and detailing and a glossy black button panel below the screen.

And in the face of what you might think are restrictive dimensions, Asus has somehow managed to squeeze in quite a set of features. There's no room for a hardware keyboard, but it’s otherwise much like other bulkier Windows Mobile devices. There's quad-band GSM, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and even a GPS receiver (though not sat-nav software is included). On the rear is a two megapixel camera, though its picture quality is little to get excited about. The only thing missing, in fact, is 3G – the Asus P320 is a GPRS-only device.

All of this hardware is complemented by a good selection of software extras, too. Perhaps to make up for the lack of an enhanced Today screen, Asus has included its own, complete with oversized digital clock display, plus a news reader ticker, weather info, calendar and message previews, all presented on a large panel that occupies half the screen. It's no SPB Mobile Shell, but it's better than the standard Microsoft offering. There's also an RSS news reader tool, a finger-friendly application launcher, plus a number of phone extras, including a profile setup and selection tool, and call filtering abilities.

Of course the small size of the P320 does have its drawbacks and the small screen is the biggest. [Smallest, surely? Ed.]. Though the same resolution (240 x 320) as most other Windows Mobile devices, the P320's screen has a much smaller diagonal – 2.61in.

Now 0.2in may not sound like much, but it's enough to make most of the Windows Mobile interface pretty much unusable with a fingertip. So, you’re stuck with using the stylus instead and disappointingly, the Asus P320's is light, stubby and all-plastic.

The Asus P320 isn’t the most powerful handset on the block, either. A 200MHz processor means you'll spend a fair bit of time staring at the Windows Mobile hourglass as you launch or switch between applications. And nor is the 64Mb of RAM particularly generous, though mitigating this is the fact that the phone is supplied a tool that allows you to actually close running applications rather than minimise them, which is Windows Mobile’s default behaviour.

That said, the lack of processor power isn't too much of a problem for this little smartphone, and we found it didn't hamstring the handset in any serious way. What we did like was the small size and light weight, which makes a refreshing change for a Windows Mobile device.

Windows Mobile 6.1 may not break much in the way of new ground, but the compact dimensions of the Asus P320 do and as long as you’re comfortable with a (stubby) stylus for your input requirements, there's little else to complain about.