Case in point is the Asus A10 that is a touch screen bar phone powered by Android 2.1 operating system. It’s a conventionally stocky phone. The front panel sports a 3.2 inch capacitive touchscreen. Below the screen are three touch based keys for back, home and options. There are no hardware keys on the front panel. The left panel has a microUSB slot for charging and PC connectivity and slot to attach to the navigation doc. The right spine has a volume rocker, while the back sports a 5.0-megapixel camera. At the top panel of the phone is the power key and 3.5 mm jack. As mentioned earlier, the phone is sturdy and smart, although the shiny front panel is a fingerprint magnet. The microSD slot is under the battery cover, but is hot-swappable.Find Your Way!The phone is completely geared to offer navigation and location based features. By default the home screen panel offers you navigation options, such as browse places and view maps. You can enter the desired location in the “Where to” option and the results are displayed below in the drop down menu. Once you choose the desired option, you can view it on the map and get walking and driving locations. Apart from that, there are a number of location based apps pre-loaded on the device. These include Ciao! Which is a location based social networking community. Garmin maps also come pre-loaded on the phone along with apps like Google Latitude, places, routes etc. Navigation using Garmin maps is easy and it enables voice-guided navigation for walking as well as driving. While we couldn't get GPS connectivity inside, outdoors, the GPS lock was pretty quick.
Android Access
The phone runs on Android 2.1 update 1; the user interface is plain vanilla Android. There are nine homescreen panels, which are customisable. The phone supports live wallpapers too. At the bottom of the touchscreen are three buttons for call logs, slide up menu key and the short key to navigation screen. The notification bar remains at the top. The touch response turns out to be quite good. However, the keys of the virtual QWERTY keypad are too small for a finger to manage. As far as the phone's Email capability goes, there is support for Microsoft Exchange, as well as POP and IMAP clients. The browsing experience is made better by kinetic scrolling and multi-touch support. WiFi connectivity enables you to get a faster browsing experience.
Making Waves
The phone comes with a 5.0-megapixel auto focus camera, but it lacks flash. The highest resolution that one can is 2560 x 1920 pixels and additionally, you can just add colour effects and adjust lightening. The pictures can be geo-tagged too. Quality of still camera is OK in well lit conditions, but low light photography screams for flash support. The highest video resolution can be at 320 x 240 and you have the option of choosing 3GPP format for MMS. The video quality of the device is acceptable and it can be geo-tagged too. There is no FM radio on the phone, but music player is present. The sound quality is OK, but the music player is without any music enhancement options. The 3.5 mm jack on the phone lets you choose the headphone of your choice. Social networking apps like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace come preloaded on the phone. Obviously you can integrate your Facebook contacts with the phonebook and upload pictures. The functionality of other SNS sites is good too. Phone's battery lasted us during an hour of navigation, couple of hours of WiFi activity, some calling and browsing.
Alternatively
The Asus A10 is priced at Rs.18,990. You can also opt for HTC Wildfire for Rs 15,400 or Nokia N97 Mini for Rs 18,400.
Would love to here from you...