Last semester, I was enlisted by my academic advisor to help a visiting German professor with some Windows XP problems, and to my surprise herr professor was using a very nice ASUS laptop. I hadn’t really been keeping track of ASUS lately, so I had no idea that they were expanding beyond motherboards and getting into gadgetry. Indeed they are, though, and in a big way. Anandtech hasa good write-upon ASUS’ssecond generationPDA. (I didn’t even know they had a first generation PDA.) It runs PocketPC 2002, and it’s got some killer specs, including a 400MHz Xscale, 32MB of ROM, 64MB of RAM, a 240×320 TFT LCD (65K colors), a built-in speaker, a built-in microphone, and an SD/MMC slot. You get all of this in a very svelte package with a ~16 hour battery life.
And then there are the nifty underclocking features. From the Anandtech article:
Some of ASUS’s software solutions are only enabled by the MyPal A600’s hardware. One such item is the ability to dynamically change the clock speed and voltage supplied to the Xscale PXA250. Using a combination of hardware and software, the unit’s processor can vary in clock speed from 100MHz to 400MHz with core voltages varying from 0.8v to 1.8v. The current software solution for the clock and voltage throttling is a menu driven one. In its current form, the MyPal’s clock speed can be defined by the user in general use as well as on an application by application basis. For example, the unit can be set to run at a maximum battery setting by default, then change to a more aggressive setting when Pocket Word is opened.
So this unit looks like a great tweaker/enthusiast PDA. I hope I get the chance to play with one at some point… If only they could come up with a better name for it.
