Asus rebranded phone also gets a breath of fresh air

With a gag we’re going to flog until someone laughs, a new PDA phone arrives on O2 under the Xda brand on both pay as you go and prepay contracts.

Running from the same Marvell PXA930 processor as the soon to be released BlackBerry Storm, the Asus P552w comes to us under the guise of the O2 Xda Zest.

This adds to their already solid foundation of Xda products, which even has an HTC model inside.

Odd we should mentioned that at this choice moment, as the Zest comes off looking like a poor man’s HTC Touch.

O2 are hoping the ‘pay as you go’ pricing model will encourage users to move over from a bog standard mobile to this PDA, without being roped into a long contract tying up the best part of your natural born life.

We did find early references online to the Xda Zest with a much much different handset by Asus associated along with it. A phones only known or referred to as the Galaxy 7, all we can assume is that O2 were going down a different route at one point.

The 2.8-inch screen based handset running Widows Mobile 6.1, also comes with a free 2 week CoPilot Sat Nav trial with full UK and Ireland GPS mapping.

With a 3MP camera, mp3 player, FM radio, Wi-Fi, Quad-band GSM and HSDPA – what more would you want in a starter PDA. That’s a rhetorical question, so please no answers on a postcard.

We questioned the inclusion of 3megapixal camera with O2, as from the specifications we received from Asus had it as being 2MP instead. Looks like they’ve moved on with the model already from when it was announced recently; what a difference a month or so makes.

We’ve been informed by Asus, the phone has a standby time of 300 hrs with 3G and 250 hrs on 2G, and the talk time of 3 hrs with 3G and 5 hrs on 2G.

The phone that shares the name with a bar of soap will be on sale in O2 stores and online at www.o2.co.uk. Costing for the handset on Pay&Go comes in at £249.99, whilst being free on choice O2 Pay Monthly contracts.