ASUS MyPal 730

The removable 1100-milliampere-hour battery provides an adequate battery life of around 3 hours in general use--significantly less than many Palm OS devices, but probably enough for a day's work. You can buy spare batteries for extended days and longer trips, though the only way to charge them is in the PDA itself. The included SmartKeeper software will automatically back up the data in the onboard memory to a memory card, thereby preserving the data if the battery runs out completely.

The A730 also has a built-in camera capable of taking photos (at a maximum resolution of 1280 by 970) and short videos. Asus refers to an included light a flash, but it's really just a white LED that can't illuminate anything beyond a couple of feet. The camera takes adequate pictures, but the images are somewhat blurry (especially in low-light situations) and their quality is on a par with what you'd get from a typical camera phone.

Not all Windows Mobile software can take advantage of the high-resolution screen, however, and some programs (such as the built-in Bluetooth manager) didn't display properly when we rotated the screen into landscape orientation. Other programs (including such games as Flux Challenge from PDA Mill) run only in portrait mode. Still, the number of programs that can take advantage of the landscape mode is increasing.

The 520-MHz XScale processor is speedy, but slower than the 620-MHz processor found in high-end IPaqs and in the Dell Axim X30.

Upshot: The Asus A730 packs a lot of features into an attractive package, but it could make better use of some of them.

Richard Baguley