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Asus is no stranger to business-centric smartphones, but the good news about the latest Asus M930 (S$898) is that it doesn’t bear much resemblance to the bulky devices usually issued by companies to shackle — sorry, we mean connect — employees to the office.
At 113 x 54 x 18.7mm, the M930 is about the same size as a typical consumer-oriented phone from Nokia or Sony Ericsson. It looks and feels great — neat chrome trimmings line a sleek matte metallic body and the build quality is fantastic. You don’t get the cheap, plastic-rich aesthetics nor the loose, rickety latches and hinges that afflict many handsets in the market.
The M930 is admittedly on the heavy side at 158g, but it’s a reassuring heft that underlines the robustness of the device.
Unfortunately, the petite size is also its downfall. The M930 strains to cram everything that its corporate workhorse rivals tout into its limited real estate, and the results, unsurprisingly, are not pretty.
It has a standard candy-bar phone layout on the outside and flips open on its horizontal axis to reveal a full Qwerty keyboard and a 2.6-inch landscape WQVGA screen. Think the Nokia E90 Communicator minus a few inches.
The problem is, neither of the displays on the M930 is big enough to comfortably handle the powerful but cluttered Windows Mobile interface. Both displays are also not touch-enabled, and in this age of advanced multi-touch and gesture-based interactions, that’s somewhat old school.
At least the keyboard, with its generously-sized keys, makes for decent thumb-typing. Internal storage is 256MB, which you might want to augment with a microSD card. That said, the multimedia capability of the phone isn’t all that outstanding that you’d need all that much storage space. For example, the built-in camera, while more responsive than expected, is only a 2-megapixel module.
Thankfully, the smartphone offers a respectable host of connectivity choices — you can surf the Net at high speed via 3.5G or WiFi, and transfer data via Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 2.0. All of these have been shoehorned into a form factor so compact that if you don’t flip the phone open, no one will realise you’re packing a serious piece of equipment powered by a TI Omap 450MHz processor.
VERDICT
While the Asus M930 scores well in terms of looks, its ambitious mix of consumer-device proportions and business-level features makes it an odd puppy that just doesn’t seem to be all that together. - TODAY/sh
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