The Glide UI on P552w by ASUS
A Short introduction on smartphone’s UI
In mobile phone industry, battle is not just happened on the heart of pixel size. But it’s also take place from the one that we’re used to touch it over on the screen; The UI aka User Interface. This is a stuff that many of iPhone users believe have made Apple set apart its mobile phone from any other cellphones out there. Sure any vendor can create their own touch screen devices, but not all of them can give the same look and feel like the one people are used to have it from the iconic candybar iPhone.
HTC from Taiwan seems to be the first smartphone manufacturer to realize this phenomenon. Yes they realize that one thing that makes Windows Mobile-powered smartphone looks bad is the lack of beautiful and responsive user interface. As a respond for this, now they have already created their own homemade UI, Touch FLO 3D, which we’ve seen it on HTC Touch Diamond and later will also be the base UI for Touch Pro series.
The white ASUS P552w Glide-enabled PDA Phone
ASUS is joining in with its Glide UI
Other Taiwan-based tech company, ASUS, is also realizing this phenomenon. As a proof, three days ago in Taipei, they’ve launched their own UI together with their latest PDA phone, P552w. This UI, dubbed as Glide, will allow P552w users to perform a variety of navigational actions – such as selecting, zooming, scrolling and flipping – easily through simple flicks of their fingers. Again, ASUS also claim that they have incorporated a wide range of applications including Multi-Home (to read the latest news), Anytime Launcher (checking weather forecast), EziPhoto (viewing photos), and EziMusic (listen and organize music). All of these apps can be controlled using users own fingers. No muss no fuss!
P552w phone features and specifications
Just like HTC Touch Diamond and Touch Pro, this ASUS-made PDA phone also sports on a great hardware specs. One that will nudge you most is the Marvell Tavor CPU that can run – well, theoretically – at 624MHz. To be honest, this clock speed even outstep the 528MHz Qualcomm CPU that powered HTC Touch Pro. For internal memory, ASUS have put 256MB Flash plus 128MB DDR. This choice, unfortunately is still lower than Touch Pro internal memory which come up with combination of both 512MB ROM and 288MB RAM.
Aside from this, P552w is a tri band GSM smartphone that works under 900/1800/1900 frequency. It is an HSDPA gadget that can give you up to 3.6Mbps transfer rate. With this powerful network support, no wonder if ASUS dare to inject Google Maps inside of it, though it’s only available for the following countries: Russia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, UK, Taiwan, and China.
The black ASUS P552w Glide-enabled PDA Phone
P552w price and availability
ASUS has not announced its first Glide-enabled PDA phone yet. Nor when it will hit the market. However, I am pretty optimist if such handset like this will crush Asia market first before Europe, USA, and other regions. And for the price, let’s say that this P552w will not far away from the price of Touch Diamond and Touch Pro which being tagged at US$700 – US$900, before subsidies and taxes of course.
Sources: ASUS | SlashPhone | Reg Hardware
[...] based on this specs, I think that this Galxy7 series could be the ASUS’ second product after P552w to introduce and encourage users to get friendly with their Glide UI. No official information on [...]