3. ASUS A716

One of the reasons this article was delayed was to wait for ASUS' MyPal A716 to become available. This is a PocketPC with built-in 802.11b and Bluetooth, as well as CF and SDIO slots. It uses an ASUS WL-155 radio module (Figure 4) that's based on the Conexant PRISM 3 chipset.

Instead of using SDIO, ASUS wisely opted to connect the WL-155 to the Intel PXA255 400MHz processor with an internal modified Compact Flash interface.

Figure 4: ASUS A716 radio

This results in significantly better WiFi speed than the H2210 / SD WiFi combo, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: ASUS A716 throughput
(click on the image for a larger view)

You can once again see a marked difference in AP to STA and STA to AP speed, with both being closer to speeds obtained with a typical desktop / notebook 11b connection, though about 1Mbps lower.