CeBIT 2003. Asus – a new player on the mobile phone market

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Asus is well-known as a manufacturer of PC and notebooks components, but it wasn’t famous as mobile phones maker. The plans of the company to work up this market were opened last year, even first photos were appeared in the Internet, but commercial samples were not made and the phones specifications were not unveiled. Asus introduced two phones and one prototype on the exhibition.

AGP-60 opens the line, this model also has another name - Shining Queen, King of the Club. The design is similar to Vertu phones, though the handset has a plastic exterior, not made of precious metals. Notify that presented phones were early prototypes and plastic quality was not the best there. The other kind of plastic will be used in commercial samples and a phone’s appearance will improve. In response to technical features AGP-60 is rather simple. It is a dual-band phone, which has OLED-display with a blue backlighting (112x64 pixels) and integrated speakerphone. Up to 2 phone numbers can be stored in the phonebook. Such application as organizer, calendar and alarm-clock are supported. According to the manufacturer, a lithium-ion battery of 630 mAh capacity provides up to 150 hours of standby time and up to 2.5 hour of talk time. Besides, the phone supports 16-tones polyphonic melodies and GPRS (class 8). This handset will be soon available in the shops. First price will be around 150 USD. Whether it is successful, depends on its release time. Now it is too early to make assumptions.

The second model - AGP-100 is a clamshell phone. It has a 65K-STN display, which has a resolution of 128x160 pixels. The picture is not vivid on it. The phone supports GPRS (class 10); 16-tones polyphony; 3 bands; voice memo, which provides up to 3 minutes of recording; up to 20 voice commands; Java and MMS. It sounds nice, isn’t it? By the way, plenty of phone colors will be available.

The peculiarity of the handset is a menu structure. For the first time the phone has as pseudo three-dimensional. Moving through a main menu, imagine that you are in the room and turn on the head, for example, you cast a glance at the organizer, then at the open book with messages and etc. Developers add a possibility to change almost all wallpapers in the main menu, you can do it yourself, downloading a special file from PC. It’s really a nice feature. All submenus are presented as icons and you can move between them with a help of navigation key. The success of this phone will also depend on several factors, it is necessary to wait for commercial samples.

The other promising phone is a clamshell AGP-600. It has an integrated camera, bluetooth, MMS, Java. They said that this smartphone is powered by Microsoft Smartphone Ozone OS. To say the truth, it is a new name for me, later I’ll try to know more about it.

Price policy and company’s strategy allow to assume that mobile phone line will be not large, but produced models will be differed in price and features from their rivals.

Let’s overview PDAs from Asus. MyPal A600 (Pocket PC2002) is popular due to a low price and good set of features. The company concentrated on this product and it was fruitful. Now a cheaper version of this model is launching, it is named A620. The difference is a plastic exterior (earlier it was an anodized aluminum). As a result, this PDA weighs lesser. Besides, CompactFlash slot was added.

A more expensive model – A710 has also a SD-card slot.

The company offers a great choice of accessories for its PDAs.

Among new accessories the most interesting one is GSM/GPRS module, it is comparable with both PDA and notebook. There is a special connector for portable handsfree, but it is possible to speak without it. This model costs about 200 USD.

That is all about PDA and mobile phones from Asus. Later we’ll tell about other manufacturers.

Eldar Murtazin ([email protected])
Translated by Maria Sennikova([email protected])

Published — 18 March 2003

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