ASUS MyPal A716

Text looked pretty good--just slightly blurry--in Microsoft Reader (even with ClearType enabled.) Photos appeared reasonably clear and detailed; the included photo viewer lets you rotate, magnify, and crop your images. Each operation takes about three seconds to complete. You can also beam your photos via IR or e-mail them, or make them the wallpaper on the home screen.

Navigation on the A716 is much the same as on other PDAs running the Windows Mobile 2003 OS. On the front of the case are a five-way navigation button and hardware buttons for the calendar, to-do, and contacts screens, plus a button--labeled with a "home" icon--that cycles through the Start Menu, Programs, and Favorites screens. The Asus Launcher app lets you customize what appears on those screens.

Asus also includes its own Backup utility, which lets you archive all or part of your PDA's data to a removable media card or to flash memory. The utility worked well, but it required you to stop all programs running on the PDA. To do this you have to dig into the PDA's memory settings screen, which isn't easy to find. The paper manual provides the instructions, but other Pocket PCs I've tried pop up detailed directions right on-screen when you need them--which seems more courteous.

The sound from the speaker on the front of the case is nothing special. The speaker projects plenty of volume, but the sound is a little hollow and unrefined. The Asus Settings let you adjust the volume, balance, and amount of treble and bass of audio files. Other than the volume, changing these settings didn't have much effect on the speaker's sound quality, but they were effective on audio played through headphones. Like most other Pocket PCs, the A716 bundles Windows Media Player for audio and video files.

One slight annoyance is that you can't have the Bluetooth and the 802.11b wireless both activated at the same time. If you wanted to use a Bluetooth keyboard while you Web-surfed using the 802.11b, this could be a problem, but in most cases you'd probably only be using one of these wireless radios at any given time. These radios also share one blue indicator light above the power switch. It would be better to have two different lights, so you could tell at a glance which one was running. As it is, you have to go to the Today (home) screen and tap an icon at the bottom of the screen to see if the Wi-Fi is activated. If the Bluetooth is off, there's a red X over the on-screen icon, so it's easer to see the Bluetooth status. The easiest setup of all would be hardware switches for both radios, but the A716 comes with neither.

Upshot: It's no petite beauty and its interface is a little lacking in refinement, but the MyPal A716 has storage capacity and connectivity options to spare.

Rebecca Freed