Hands on with the Sony Ericsson P1i

[slitchfield]

Rafe's been getting down to business with Sony Ericsson's latest UIQ 3 smartphone, the P1i. Combining all the best bits of the M600 and P990, along with four times the RAM and a few welcome extras, the P1i looks extremely promising. Here's Rafe's illustrated hands-on preview.

Read on in the full article.

[viipottaja]

So again, what does the "i" stand for in a brand new model?

the "i" in Sony-Ericsson phones just means international, in contrast eg. to "c" for chinese markets

[dgduris]

Man! I wish there would be an "a" model!

Is the phone COMPLETELY usable without using the touchscreen (the 3 softkeys along the screen bottom excepted)?

Other Qs:

Is it possible to call up the task manager via a hardware key? That task manager icon looks very small...

Does the phone charge over USB?

Which ways can the screen be orientated? ie. for left and right handers.

Is there a speech to text app similar to the nokia reader? (useful for in-car listening)

As a premise, trading a few features for usability is good, I hope they've taken the time to finish the job this time (vs the P990).

You write that the video recording capacity of the phone is "good enough", but what exactly does that mean?
SE has robbed it's phones of good video recording features before. How does the camera compare with that of the k790i/k800i/k810i series of phones? Does it have bestpic?, how does the light compare with the xenon flash?, sub-par?

And what is the maximum video resolution/framerate? (this is the question I am most anxious to get answered!)

Being able to take accurate video notes during lectures or presentations would be a huge plus, particularly with a memory stick micro port allowing you to take a limitless amount of videonotes during a trip!
How about the wifi - will it be easy to set up and use in an environment requirring the use of a virtual private network client?

[Rafe]

Its difficult to precise about camera and video performance because the phone is still some way from release.

I haven't tested in extensively, but I didn't see BestPic. I'd say the camera is better than the P990, maybe about the same as the K800 but without further testing... The LED flash isn't as good as the an Xeon flash. Not sure about video capture - I would assume its 320 x 240 like the P990.

There is a VPN client on the P1i, cant comment on usage.

The phone does charge over USB

The Task Manager can be set to activated by using the internet key on the right hand side of the phone.

I believe screen orientation is variable on application as I recall it defaults to right handers, but honestly it doesn't make much difference with this device (aside from the turning process), you can use the jog dial and back key just as easily from bottom as top.

I don't think there's a speech app on board out of the box.

Yes I agree features for improved usability is a good trade off. I think the P1i will be much much better than P990 out of the box in stability terms.

one thing i've noticed that SE is not willing to give a phone every thing
they increase an option and decrease another one
for example why the camera is not as inhanced as K800 and K810???
why no GPRS???

if they did that it would be a phone to kill for and kill all others
and who ever pays 4 that quality would love to pay a little bit more for the best

[n0k1a]

One list of specs I saw did show that it has GPRS on the GSM bands; I would surely hope that it would have both GPRS and EDGE support these days.

It does seem that SE always has some essential feature lacking, and in this model (which otherwise looks very tempting) it is: NO GSM 850 band!!! Being on T-Mobile USA, which has extensive GSM 850 roaming agreements in many areas (as well as their own 850 coverage being built from what I read), I could not even begin to justify purchasing such a device. Quad band GSM should be the very minimum offered at this point in time. Of course, Nokia did the same thing with the otherwise tempting E70...

It may make economic sense to offer low-end phones with only the appropriate bands for a particular region, but not high-end smartphones.

The use of a proprietary Memory Stick variant rather than a standard memory card format is another minus, but is obviously to be expected due to the Sony connection.

For now, the E61 remains king for me. An E90 will make a nice secondary phone when it becomes available.

Something else I found lacking on SE feature phones (some of which actually looked pretty nice) was profiles. Having never played with a UIQ device, does it offer profiles?

[jah]

@n0k1a

no profiles available for UIQ3 devices, and no third-party option either at the moment

[jah]

@unregistered

where does it say the P1i does not have GPRS?

Picture quality does not look too different to the K800i

A full list of video formats supported?

[the_man_who]

thx

[the_man_who]

I said thanks

How is one hand use? Does it support classical T9?
Harald Weedon-Fekjaer