Following numerous leaks, Sony Ericsson has finally - and officially - taken the wraps off its P900 model, the long-anticipated successor to the P800 wireless handheld.
Read the review of Sony Ericsson P900
At simultaneous events in Las Vegas and Beijing today, Sony Ericsson unveiled the long-anticipated P900 wireless handheld, to be available starting next month. Building on the successful P800, Sony Ericsson pegs the P900 as smaller, faster, simpler and more flexible than its predecessor. Despite bearing a striking similarity to the P800, the P900 does however have a couple of new features up its sleeve such as a 16-bit colour screen and the ability to record video.
 | The Sony Ericsson P900 is sleeker than its successor, and boasts minor improvements
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Sony Ericsson itself commented on persistent rumours of a follow-up to the successful P800 preceding its launch, chalking the interest up to strong interest for Sony Ericsson’s Symbian-based offering and laying ground for further speculation as to whether information leaked to the public was intentionally controlled by Sony Ericsson.
Still based on Symbian OS 7.0 which powers the UIQ platform of the device, the P900 shares many of the traits of the P800 such as a clamshell flip cover design, an integrated digital camera with VGA resolution and tri-band GSM/GPRS 900/1800/1900 MHz connectivity. In addition, the P900 is also capable of recording video at QCIF resolution with MPEG4 video compression, and video clips should consume approximately 1 MB of storage per minute according to Sony Ericsson.
The screen of the P900 boasts improved colour depth, and is capable of displaying 65,536 colours compared to 4,096 colours on the P800. Improvements to software also enable full and wide screen viewing of images, and with support for both J2ME and the Mophun gaming platform, will be able to access a variety of application and games content. The much praised 5-way Jog Dial from the P800 remains unchanged, as do polyphonic ringtones and processing power sufficient to enable 3D gaming (of which one is bundled with the P900).
Flash memory in the P900 versus the P800 has been increased from 32 MB to 48 MB, which as a result has increased available user memory to 16 MB. Sony Ericsson still insists on implementing its highly unpopular Memory Stick Duo storage format, but as a welcome bonus doubles the amount of bundled memory with a 32 MB Memory Stick Duo. Memory Sticks up to 128 MB capacity are supported, which should allow room for some hours of MP3 music to be played back through the audio player of the P900.
The embedded P900 browser supports HTML, WAP and cHTML content types within one single browser. In addition, the much praised Opera browser featuring small-screen rendering technology comes bundled with the P900, and is also available as a free download from the Sony Ericsson web site. When viewing Internet content through this browser, pages are reformatted to fit inside the screen width and eliminate the need for horizontal scrolling.
Starting today, Sony Ericsson has also introduced phone update services available from the Sony Ericsson web site. They will allow future owners of the P900 to download the latest version of the phone software directly to the phone without having to visit a service centre.
The P900 will start shipping to EMEA and APAC markets in the fourth quarter of 2003, while U.S. and China residents will be able to purchase the device some time in the first quarter of 2004.
Additional hi-res pictures of the Sony Ericsson P900 are available on the following pages.
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