4. It's Not Just Pretty - It's Fast, Too

But the MyPal A600 isn't just about its looks. Asus also developed sophisticated CPU settings so you can tweak both power consumption and the performance of your XScale processor.

Asus' specialty is providing sophisticated CPU settings.

The manufacturer has integrated a control panel option called "Advanced Performance Enhancement," which makes data caching more efficient and enhances performance. A message appears on the screen, warning you that this could make the system less stable, but we didn't encounter any problems during the tests. Performance improves by leaps and bounds. For example, it takes much less time to scroll through complex HTML documents. The benchmark readings clearly indicate a jump in performance. While the non-enhanced MyPal needs 5032 milliseconds for the integer benchmark, it only takes 3449 milliseconds with cache optimization.

Users can also control the CPU clock using one of three settings (Turbo, Normal and Power Save modes). In Normal mode, the clock is set to 200 MHz, while the Power Save mode drops the clock to 100 MHz, thus saving battery power. In the 400 MHz mode, the PCpro benchmark calculates a total running time of two hours and 49 minutes. In Power Save mode, the PDA keeps on trucking for over eight hours.

All's quiet on the display front - the A600 comes with a reflective color display (16-bit color depth) that displays at a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels - standard fare for pocket PCs. The anti-reflection on the display surface is excellent, allowing users to read the screen content even when a light is shone directly on it.

Asus' first foray into the PPC world is excellent, with lots of power and an attractive design. The only drawback is the price, which is far too high considering it is without a Flash slot or integrated WLAN or Bluetooth modules.