Reporting from London, Jørgen Sundgot shares his thoughts on the new, 3G-enabled Sony Ericsson P990i communicator sporting a 2 MP camera, Wi-Fi, landscape browsing and more.
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Sony Ericsson P990i
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Score: 67% When: August 2006 Worth: $650 - $750
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The P990i comes with a 2-megapixel camera, a wealth of productivity apps, built-in Wi-Fi and a teeny, tiny QWERTY keypad. Philip Berne gives this would-be Treo killer the once-over.
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They sure took their sweet time, but Sony Ericsson finally appear to be back - with a vengeance. Having worked up a solid footing in the handset business with handsets such as the popular K750i and W800i, the company finally found time to refresh its languishing line of P series communicators - and it's a solid one. I've just had the pleasure of playing with the P990i in a pre-release state, and despite being virtually identical to its predecessor in terms of size and shape, there's a whole lot of new goodies under the hood.
Having had its looks further refined over those of its predecessor, the P990i is a rather attractive - yet business-like - unit. The characteristic dual-usage design remains with a flip-down numerical keypad covering the bottom half of the display, but in contrast to poor design of the thumbboard of the P910i, that of the P990i intelligently integrates its thumbboard into the body of the device rather than the back of its flip - and is rather comfortable, if I may say so.
Located beneath the screen, the thumbboard feels a bit cramped at first due to its rectangle-shaped buttons with vertical bezel, but a bit of use quickly yielded adequate results. As upsides, an extremely comfortable soft blue backlight emanates from the buttons, and the P990i also sees its predictive text functionality improved - whilst handwriting recognition remains for those favouring this particular method of input. Also, for those who prefer immediate access to the advanced functionality of the device at all times, the flip can - as with previous P series communicators - be removed.
What lies beneath
The screen of the P990 is excellent, sporting an improved resolution of 240 x 320 pixels and a 262K colour depth with impressive brightness and clarity. The user interface has been enhanced and now accomodates slightly more information as a result of the increased horizontal resolution, and the navigational paradigm has also been altered slightly - but not too much to make users feel as if though they're on unfamiliar ground.
Impressively, Sony Ericsson has also managed to squeeze a vastly improved communications array into the device; unfortunately, only a limited amount of this functionality could be previewed as the device made available was an early pre-production sample. Still, the merging of GSM/GPRS 900/1800/1900 MHz with WCDMA 2100 MHz 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi 802.11b, Infrared and full USB 1.0 operating at 12 Mbps - as opposed to the bungled 0.7 Mbps serial/USB conversion of the P900 series - in such a compact device must be said to be quite a feat.
As if that wasn't enough, the P990i also contains a 2.0 Megapixel camera with close to identical capabilities to that of the lauded Sony Ericsson K750i, which should yield excellent results with its LED photo light, auto focus and other advanced imaging capabilities. As with earlier models, data can either be stored to the internal memory of the device - now expanded to a comfortable 80 MB - or a Memory Stick Duo card which can soon be had in size of up to 4 GB. Also, it's worth mentioning that the inclusion of an additional, front-mounted 0.3 MP camera enables video calling; a handy addition.
The devil is in the details
There are quite a few small touches which contribute to raising the overall impression of the P990. For instance, the inclusion of a stereo FM radio with RDS is a very clever stroke indeed, whilst instating version 8 of the Opera browser as the default browser is another. Even better, the latter supports landscape browsing, and is, along with the imaging applications, the only application to take advantage of new APIs which allow developers to create applications which run in landscape mode on the P990i; genius.
Another feature I've wanted to see for a long time is the Activity screen, which - much like the Today screen in Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform - gathers information from a number of applications including, for now, messaging and PIM, and displays this as glanceable information. As with the new landscape APIs, developers will be able to tap into this concept.
Unfortunately, however, there is one major snag with the P990i, which is also the reason why Sony Ericsson opted to announce the existence of the device so far in advance of its introduction - slated to take place in the first quarter of 2006. Due to the introduction of a new security framework in Symbian OS 9 none of the existing applications for the P900 series will be compatible with the P990; they will need to be recompiled with support for the security precautions. This should prove a relatively simple task for developers according to Sony Ericsson's claims, but something tells me users will raise eyebrows at having to rely on the mercy of software houses to release upgrades to their applications to be able to use previously bought applications with the P990i.
All in all, the Sony Ericsson P990i - or the P990, depending on whom you ask - shows a great amount of promise. If the company can rally its developer community to quickly provide updated versions of its software, the feature set of the P990 is fully on par with the best of the competition it will face in the first quarter. What remains to see, however, is whether such a feat of engineering will come with an equally impressive price tag.
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