Asus Mobile 5.0 3.5-Inch Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator

by Asus

Product Details

• Item Weight: 4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000H28VE8
• Item model number: 90A-S521040T
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #260,858 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)

Product Description

MyPal A636N - The Mobile Navigator Pro PDA

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good but could be even better !!!!, November 19, 2006

By 

Stanislav Avezov (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Asus Mobile 5.0 3.5-Inch Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator (Electronics)

I got my Asus A636N on Amazon.com in Sept 2006. I have been using it for the past 2 months and I like it.

I always wanted to have a PDA combined with a GPS. Asus made some initial improvements on A636 model (with new 2.0 blue tooth as well as adding 802.11 b/g WiFi. The GPS that is provided by Destinator is also recently udated to the version of 6.0 which has some improvements over the previous version.

The PDA is like any other Windows Mobile 5.0 (I had my Palm Vx for 3 years and I loved it for its simplicity). Also, I was never a big fan of Microsoft period. I find Outlook difficult to use versus Palm software.

It took a while for Amazon to ship this thing to me (A general complaint I have with Amazon - they take a while !!!) Out of the box, it was pretty easy to put together. It comes in a nice box with everything in it. Having a ZoneAlarm firewall on my computer I found that to synchronize this PDA to my computer Outlook program is difficult. The ZoneAlarm prevents one to connect with the Micosoft ActiveSync. In the box, there is actually a piece of paper talking about this potential problem and it provides an address to microsoft.com to figure this problem out. Anyway, I have a free version of ZoneAlarm but the directions on how to fix this problem on Microsoft posted for the ZoneAlarm Pro. So I still can't get this thing to synch as long as my computer is running Zone Alarm. So to do this you need to shut down zone alarm and then connect to your PDA.

The GPS: My dad uses a Nuvi 350 and that little thing is great. The GPS their seems better and much more intuitive than on Asus A636N. Battery life take a beeting when it comes to using a GPS. Good that a car charger is provided by Asus. The GPS does work and it is pretty good. Gets the signal in about 1 min. It is however, as I mentioned little hard to figure out than for example in Nuvi 350.

Something that is also bugging me about Outlook is when you sat the appointment you made need with an alarm (reminder of sorts that Outlook has). The PDA would somehow turn itself on. This increases the amount of battery used and I found my PDA dead after about 3 days ow not turning it on at all (I thought I had at least 50% energy left). Anyhow, to solve this problem you need to make sure that no appointment has an alarm checked of (or make sure to dismiss the alarm when you turn on the PDA).

The battery life as advertised is quite good and could hold charge for a long time if not used at all.

I hope for a better GPS as well as maybe a little thinner PDA, having a cradle (I think the new Asus A639 has the cradle) and priced less. Otherwise, besides microsoft problems, pretty happy. I hope this helps a little.