9. Benchmark Results, Continued

On its Web site, Asus claims you can get up to 19 hours of continuous use from the Mypal A620. We checked this out and managed 15 1/2 hours, albeit with relatively unrealistic and impractical settings - we deactivated the backlight and selected Power Saving CPU mode. We are certainly not aware of anyone who uses a Pocket PC with the backlight switched off...

We did, of course, ask ourselves why the battery life of the Mypal A620 is shorter than the model it replaces, despite the higher capacity battery and power-saving processor. It seems that another current consuming device in the Mypal A620 is drawing serious amounts of power. This device could well be the graphics chip. As the benchmark with the Pocket Quake FPS game shows, it is twenty-five percent faster than its competitor, the HP Ipaq H2210/H2215.

The only way to achieve this kind of performance gain is to run the graphics component at a much higher speed. Faster graphics performance necessitates higher power consumption, which in turn means reduced battery life.

The manufacturer would or could not tell us which graphics chip Asus has fitted to the Mypal A620. It cannot be denied, however, that this "mysterious stranger" is a very capable performer.

With a brightness value of 72 cd/m2, the 3.8" TFT display is very easy to read in average room lighting, and easy to read outside in normal daylight.

The Mypal A620 displays a good turn of speed in this practical test (synchronizing 1600 address book contacts via USB). As we discovered with HP's Ipaq H2210/2215, doubling of the PXA255 CPU's bus speed to 200MHz has a positive effect on performance. The faster internal bus means that the CPU can communicate faster with the memory, which speeds up data synchronization.