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Sony Ericcson P990i Review
Flipping heck!
The P990i is the latest in a line of P series smartphones from Sony Ericsson. Previous smartphones in the range have been met with almost obsessive loyalty, making them a hard act to follow, and even today, when there are plenty of smartphone choices around the ‘P’ has a loyalty many others would love to emulate.
Announced last October it is in some ways a shame that the P990i appears just after Sony Ericsson’s M600i and just before its W950i. All three handsets run Symbian 9.1 and UIQ 3. We’ve already looked at the M600i, and will review the W950i as soon as we get our hands on one.
The handsets are aimed at different markets - the M and W share very similar hardware design, but the W has a rather nifty 4GB of internal memory and is aimed at music fans.
The point is that in the past the ‘P’s have gone it alone as Sony Ericsson UIQ handset, and the new P is part of a range. Does the P990i stand tall against its new competitors?
Certainly as far as size goes the P990i is a giant both in comparison to the W and M and also in comparison to other smartphones. Weighing in at 150g it is quite an ask for the everyday pocket, and measuring 114 x 57 x 25 mm it isn’t exactly the Tiny Tim of the smartphone world.
You can reduce its overall size by taking off the number pad. Like all the previous ‘P’ handsets, this is a flip section you can pull down to reveal an additional area of screen – about a fifth of it is covered when the flip is closed. In this case pulling the flip down also reveals a tiny qwerty keyboard.
Removing the flip is a simple job – you get a tiny screwdriver and a set of instructions. The gaping hole in the P990i’s shell that is left when you have performed your amputation is plugged with a little replacement cover.
We’d suggest you perform this operation as soon as possible because during testing the flip proved to be very, very annoying. Here are a couple of reasons why.
The P990i has a touch sensitive screen. But only when the flip is down. When the flip is up you can’t tap at the screen. There is a control panel for making settings and suchlike. But you can’t get at it when the flip is up. Some other features aren’t accessible with the flip up either. When a call comes in, you can put it on speakerphone. With the flip up you make two key presses to do this. With the flip down you make two screen taps to do the same thing. In each case you work with different areas of the screen. In essence, my point is that in many cases there are two ways of getting around this handset, and if you want the flip you are going to have to learn both. This is very irritating. And without the flip the P990i becomes smaller and lighter too.
There are some other annoying things about the P990i. The UIQ interface can be a little pesky to use at times. In touch screen mode some icons pretty small to tap at with a finger. When they are sitting in a corner of the screen, they are even more difficult to poke at.
There is a scroll wheel on the left edge of the casing which you can use to move around menus and within applications. This is a characteristic of the P series, and should offer a fast and easy way of getting around. But for some odd reason as you scroll through menus the highlights sort of hover rather than move around smoothly. We found we missed quite a lot of selections because of this.
Sorry to keep carping, but here’s another gripe. Bearing in mind that this is a smart phone and that one of its main roles is likely to be mobile email and text manipulation the weary keyboard is somewhat small.
So, we’ve made our point that in usability terms the P990i isn’t all that hot. Which is a huge pity because there is oodles of good stuff here. When you are working in touch screen mode the handwriting recognition is superb, and in our experience the predictive text system guesses the words you want to write very accurately which can make writing longer words in particular fast.
There is support for POP and push email, and a single screen gives you access to this, SMS, MMS and voicemail messages really easily.
Document readers for Word, Excel and PDF are here. Video call quality was fine on test – there is a small front facing camera above the screen on the right.
The main camera, a 2 megapixel job with auto focus and macro mode has a lens cover in the shape of a disc.
When you swivel this to reveal the lens, the camera is activated. A button on the bottom right side of the handset invokes auto focus at a half press, takes a shot at a full press. The camera produced some very good quality shots.
Bluetooth, WiFi and Infrared are all here, and the P990i supports A2DP for sending music to a stereo headset via Bluetooth. Music playback was impressive through the speaker and reasonably good through the proprietary headset and there is an FM radio too. A media button on the left side of the casing lets you control playback. There ism’t a lot of free memory – of the 60MB built in our review unit had under 20MB free. The P990i supports Memory Stick Duo and PRO Duo and ours came with a rather paltry 64MB card.
The screen itself is a gem. 240 x 320 pixels of clarity and brightness, and it is shown off to good effect nowhere better than the Web browser, which lets you flick the screen into landscape format to get the best view of sites. Oh, and you get a docking cradle as well as PC synching software, the former being something of a rarity these days.
What all this adds up to is a handset which has a huge amount going for it in software terms, but which is a bit of a let down when you come to actually live with it. Fans of the series will hunker down with the manual and discover the beauty within. Newcomers to smart phones might prefer something that is a bit easier to get to grips with.
This review covers the above mobile phone only and does not address the performance of any 3G Network. The score is based on a 3G mobile phone checklist.
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