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Introduction

Asus has really gone in a new direction with their upcoming a730 line of PDA’s. They are offering two devices carrying the a730 name, one with 64mb of RAM and Bluetooth. The other will be offering 128mb of RAM, Bluetooth and WiFi.

This review is of the 64mb unit with Bluetooth only. Another important note is that although some of you may have already seen a couple a730 reviews on the internet, many of those reviews were written based on pre-production hardware. This review is of a final production unit. All of the images throughout this review can be clicked to see a much larger high resolution picture.

You can navigate through the pages of this review by following the links at the bottom right of each page.

Enjoy.

What’s in the box?

Below you will find the box contents according to the…well the box.

• Asus MyPal A730 Pocket PC Handheld Device
• Asus MyPal A730 Cradle and Traveling Sync Cable
• AC Adapter and Power Cable
• Manual, Quick Start Guide and Warranty Card
• Microsoft Companion CD: Including Microsoft Outlook 2002 and Microsoft ActiveSync 3.7.1
• Protection Case
• Bonus CD

A couple of interesting things here, the box does not mention the fact that it comes with an extra stylus, which I found a good use for (you will see later in the review). And also, the a730’s are not shipping with the USB Host cable which is a bit of a disappointment. The unit is still capable of USB Host, but you will need to buy the cable separately.

The bonus CD, as always with Asus Devices, actually contains some cool stuff. This time around they shipped the CD with only full version software as far as I can tell. It comes with full versions of the below titles:

• Pa-Pa Go
• Money Tracer
• Presentation DX
• Pocket Painter
• Map King
• Engineering Calculator
• Pocket Book
• Dung Cleaner – A personal favorite
• More Games
• Monster SIP
• Monster Chinese

As you can probably tell by some of the titles, these are not all very familiar programs. But I still commend Asus for putting out this bonus CD; it is something I rarely see manufactures doing nowadays. After a little bit of snooping around google.com I found that just about everything on the bonus CD is from a company called MactionTech, so you can go there for more info on these titles.

Specifications

The specifications, verbatim from the box of the a730

• 520 MHz Intel XScale PXA270 Processor
• Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition
• 3.7” Brilliant Transflective TFT LCD65536 Full Color, 16-bit Display, 640x480 Resolution
• 64 MB Flash and 64 MB SDRAM (48mb Available for Western Languages)
• Dual Slot- One CompactFlash Type II Car Slot (3.3v), One SD Slot/SDIO Support (3.3v)
• Integrated Microphone and Speaker
• Full Duplex Record and Playback
• One 3.5mm Earphone Jack and MP3 Stereo
• Bluetooth with Specification Version 1.1
• Infrared Port: 115.2 kbps Max
• 1100 mAh Lithium Ion Removable Battery
• Size: 117.5 x 72.8 x 16.9 mm
• Weight: 170g

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