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review: sony ericsson P900

the sony ericsson P900 is about 20% smaller than its predecessor, the P800. to me, that's about 20% better. in fact, i think that well describes the P900 in general: it's about 20% better than the p800 across the board - and as the P800 was about 75% of what i look for in a smartphone...well, that adds up to about 95%! well actually, 20% of 75 is 15% so it adds up to 90% - but whatever, this entry isn't about math, it's about the pleasure of getting to review what i now consider the best "smartphone" on the market. the one to beat. the one to have right now.

no, i don't like every phone...it just so happens i've only reviewed phones i like. someday i'll get around to filling in the blanks with the ones i don't like so much, but in the meantime, here we go. i'd like to describe the P900 independent of the P800, but it's difficult, as the P800 was already one of my favorite phones.

please see matt's thorough and much-more-well-written-than-i-could-do P800 review, guest authored right here on line of site.

is that a phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
let me reiterate that the P900 is 20% smaller than the P800 and it makes a huge difference, because a much of that is in the width. the P900 fits comfortably in your baggy jeans pocket and is nowhere as noticeable as the P800. the screen itself is noticeably bigger however, especially in the "flip-closed" mode.

time for an aside: the P900 can be operated in both flip-open and flip-closed mode. in flip-closed mode, it's operated much like any other candy-bar phone, with the keypad under the screen. in flip-open mode, the p900 is a pen based phone similar to those of you have used the palm operating system.
the flip-closed mode is shown here on the left. note my old school pre-DT, pre-T-Mobile "vstream" sim card. that's a keeper.
for more detailed size comparisons, look here.

the phone
i could be imagining it, but i think the phone was also improved quite a bit in both reception and volume. i the signal seems to be stronger, and the speaker volume seems to be "one louder". yes, this one goes to eleven.

you have a choice of managing your contacts from both the sim or the on-board address book, although you'll need to use the on-board version if you want to use voice activated dialing, attach email addresses to contacts, or have multiple phone numbers attached to one contact. now that every new phone seems to implement things this way, isn't it time for 3GSM implement this one to many functionality as a standard on the SIM card? surely if the scandanavians took the lead here, everyone else would follow suit.

jogging
one of the most innovative features of the P900 is the 5-way jog wheel (scroll up, scroll down, press in, press forward, press back), which goes beyond the 3-way movement (scroll up, scroll down, press in) that is found on other devices such as the RIM blackberry. it's amazing how easy it is to navigate a menu system with this type of control, and it's absolutely critical to the success of the "flip closed" mode. i'd even love to see such a control on more of sony ericsson's phones that are already equipped with a joystick. actually, one of my bigger gripes with this design is the lack of a small joystick or navigation pad that could make this a better game playing machine. but hey, i wanted the p800 smaller and that's what i got, so i'll shut up about that now.

the operating system
the p900 is based on the symbian 7.0 operating system with the pen based UIQ 2.1 user interface ( for more on symbian, look here). the symbian OS provides out of the box functionality for PDA functions such as tasks, contacts, and calendar, as well as a phone, and the usual sync you've come to expect with the likes of microsoft outlook, as well as wireless sync we're not all used to such as hosted services like phonesync.com and smart space.

the input methods of the device are now t9 in flip closed mode (which i now use most of the time for texting, and was sorely missed on teh P800) and jot, a handwriting recognition system, which works in flip open mode. jot is the same core used on the palm graffitti 2 system, and i really find it to be the best handwriting recognition on the market. in my opinion, it really blows both methods of recognition found on the pocket pc out of the water, but your mileage may vary.

the operating system is open to allow developers to create applications that can be chosen and loaded by the user to enhance the experience. you won't find as many applications as there are for the palm OS, but the list is growing every day. openness is a good thing for a phone owner because it allows you to purchase apps through as many differnt models as possible, that is a) a carrier sponsored download site with carrier wallet such as mMode by att wireless b) a third party site such as handango or c) shareware sites like my-symbian.com. this is a different model than is pushed by qualcomm on BREW enabled phones, in which the only way to get apps on your phone is to purchase them via the carrier at hefty monthly subscription fees. (look for a feature on BREW vs. everything else coming soon right here.)

one of the more exciting features of this version of symbian and this phone packaging is support for MIDP 2.0 for J2ME. I've had some gripes in the past about MIDP 1.0 implementations on phones, and i'm glad to report that most of these seem to be solved on the P900. J2ME apps execute pretty much as seamlessly as native symbian C++ apps. it's not entireley obvious what language the program is written in anymore, and that's a good thing. for the most part an app is an app on the P900, which is the way it should be. we'll also be starting to see things like being able to launch a J2ME app from an SMS message which will allow us to have active applications. in fact, we're currently working on a couple projects that plan to utilize this feature. stay tuned.

the camera

like many, i'm of the opinion that many underestimate how having a camera on your phone is going to change how we communicate. i think people underestimate even more the impact of a capable on-board video camera. although mobile video has been around for quite a while on the nokia 3650, usage of this technology hasn't permeated our culture as much as it will just yet. with a 128MB memory stick, you can record an hour of video on the p900. that's pretty impressive. that's enough to easily record every at-bat at your son's little league game, to be emailed to the out of town spouse, and even more than enough to capture the highlights for the buddy who stayed home from the night of bar-crawling. and the fact that the video snippets can be emailed or MMSed immediately is huge! no need to rip from the camera, edit on your mac and send. no need to plug in your camera to your laptop, transfer and email. it can all be done moments after the event is captured.

assuming privacy issues don't get in the way, camera and video in the quality provided by the P900 are going to make a huge impact. hell, the north korean henchmen in die another day were using the P900 two years ago. isn't it time for a phone like this to go legit? the revolution will not be televised, it will be moblogged or videoblogged. if you use your cellphone in the locker room, you have a problem anyway.

i did a cameraphone shootout a few weeks ago and the P800 in my opinion won hands down (although i didn't have a sharp gx20, which is generally considered to be the best outside of japan) - but i think the quality of the camera on the P900 is even better. i'll do an updated shootout soon.

most cameraphones these days have different settings or presets for daytime, night time, indoors, outdoors - but getting to these settings is never quick and easy, and that makes those options pretty useless when you see a picture you have to snap on an impulse. SE smartly uses the thumbwheel for this task, making it super simple to change between presets, and even from camera to video mode. this is definitely rev 2 stuff. what i couldn't find was a default option for where to save images and videos. it seems like you would always want to save videos to the memory stick instead of internal memory, but i couldn't figure out how to get the Communicorder to do this. you can do it manually before you take each shot however. more on memory later.

there are 2 video presets - "video" and "message video" - the former which records and .mp4 and the latter that records a time limited video wrapped in a .3gp envelope for the mms standard. the quality of the video is pretty good. here's an example video.

good king bluetooth looked out on the feast of stephen

i can't really live without bluetooth on a phone anymore. i hate carrying cables with me, and is too slow to be useful, not to mention the line of sight restrictions while using it. i always use a bluetooth headset while driving, and my next car will be bluetooth enabled. i use my bluetooth phone as a GPRS modem while travelling, and mostly i use bluetooth to install software and transfer pictures and movies to my pc.

so although all of this stuff is supported to the ultimo on the P900, not much of it worked on the first release version i have. working with a headset was fine, and pairing (when you work with bluetooth, you have to first "pair" the phone with the other device you are communicating with) it with other devices from the phone worked fine, but any action initiated from another device did not work. this seems to be a known problem with other owners and will hopefully be fixed in the first OS update.
[editorial note: after this was written, i discovered my original device was indeed defective from a hardware standpoint. ericsson flashed the device with the latest firmware and it didn't fix it. a replacement device with the same firmware worked fine. ]

the P900 only implements the "Headset" profile, not the "Handsfree" profile - so make sure your headset supports both.

OTA flash upgrades!

which reminds me, one of the best features of the P900 is the ability to update your phone's firmware over-the-air without having to send your phone into a sony ericsson service center. on the p800, they were updating the applets supplied on top of UIQ such as the picture viewer and the MMS viewer pretty often, so it will be nice to always be up to date. as of this writing, sony ericsson has not launched this OTA update site.

can i ditch that n-gage and play games on this?

i think the gameplay potential of the p900 is there as far as what the display supports and the speed of the processor - in fact, the vrally demo provided on the support site is darn impressive. that said, i have yet to play an action game that worked well on the p900, mostly because of the lack of an acceptable control. i've never been able to play stylus based games on any other platform either, and the jogwheel, although it supports 5 directions is really not a fungible replacement. the j2me vm give you an optional onscreen joystick, but this again does not provide enough control to play anything interesting. the P900 website marks this as supporting "advanced widescreen gaming". it sure does look pretty but i still wish i had a hardware joystick!

can i ditch my ipod?

the P900 does a great job of playing mp3s. it seemed to have no trouble with high bit rate and variable bit rate mp3s, and the sound quality i thought was the best i've heard on a phone. the biggest limitation is the lack of available storage. by not supporting memory stick duo pro, but just memory stick duo, SE has capped the limit at 128MB for storage of mp3s, videos, pictures, and applications to share. that's unfortunate, because with a 512MB memory stick duo card, sharing all those things would have been a lot more palatable.

hey, all you device manufacturer product managers, listen: everyone rips their MP3s at 128kbps, minimum. no one wants to rip lower quality MP3s just for their mobile device. find a way to allow at least a GIG of flash memory on your next phone. soon. please!

how about my blackberry? can i leave that at home?

in many cases, yes you can. the blackberry is still the best tool for wireless email, but the P900 comes in a damn close second. if you can handle getting your email in 15 minute increments versus the second the mail is received, then you can definitely get by with this as an email device. it still doesn't support HTML email, but there are viewers for file attachments, and reading and responding to emails in either flip-open or closed mode is totally usable. the speed of email retreival over GPRS was totally acceptable.

on the MMS side of the house, the P900 continues to showcase state of the art features like playing your MMS in full screen mode, and allowing you to launch the picture viewer from a message and zoom in and out on an image. the device now supports reception of MMS messages up to 300K, which is about as big as you'll find on any device.

finally, texting. well, having all the options of t9 with the flip closed, jot with the flip open, as well as keyboard mode make this pretty easy as well. the bases are covered.

other improvements worth noting over the P800

improved screen color and brightness.
improved battery life - a larger capacity battery is provided and lasted over a day with my normal use.
stylus - now a metal stylus is provided over the flimsy plastic
keypad - the tactile feel of the keypad is a huge improvement

in summary
sony ericsson suceeded in making a great phone better. although it's a little big for some, this is the state of the art right now. the P900 is a useful business and personal tool - and i expect to see some great enterprise solutions created around it as well. we are working on two as we speak. yes, it could use more internal and external memory. you can never have enough memory.

if sony ericsson is smart, they'll find a way to step up production, make production cheaper (mine was manufactured in france, an odd choice for a japanese/swedish joint venture, and not on the top of the list for "cheap labor") and get this thing to market everywhere they can, as soon as they can. they'll probably wait for the discontinued P800 to empty out of the channel, and that's too bad, because more people need to witness this revolution first-hand.

ratings
phone: 8
texting: 8
mms: 10
email: 9
browser: 9
pda features: 7
camera: 9
battery: 5
usability: 8
durability: 8
stability: 8
gameplay potential: 4
third party apps: 9
fashion: 8
out-of-box accessories: 8

Posted by Steve at November 11, 2003 11:08 PM | TrackBack