Unboxing the Sony Ericsson P1i and First Impressions

[slitchfield]

It's here at last, read on for Steve Litchfield's first impressions, ahead of Rafe's big P1i review....

Read on in the full article.

[stuclark]

Does the flash actually work now? (pre-production ones crashed every time you tried to activate the flash)

[slitchfield]

Yes, the flash works fine, though I still hate the camera interface with a vengeance...... some text is horizontal, some is vertical, icons aren't obvious, it's a mess....

[malerocks]

A thought... we all use screen protectors to make sure that the screens are scratch free for as long as possible. Instead, can't the screens be made of such a material that its resists scratches, doing away with the need of putting on a screen protector in the 1st place? Its something that everyone needs.

[okubax]

If they'd shipped the P990 with even half this much RAM, they'd have a whole different device success story on their hands

I am not so sure about that steve, the p990 will still come with loads of bugs that will ruin the fun, but still the RAM would have been somewhat advatageous.

Just have one question for you steve, would you recomment a P990i owner to upgrade to a P1i ? seriously ?

[slitchfield]

Probably not, as long as you're on the latest P990 firmware. The extra RAM makes a difference, but probably not an extra £300 difference, unless you've got cash to burn....

Not that this will stop P990 power users upgrading. If you like the design then you're always going to want the latest iteration of it, etc.

Steve

[dgduris]

C'mon SE! How about a little 850 GSM love for us Yanks!

[Sergey Zak]

• 15 fps? SE is crippling its phones not to hurt their camcorder sales.
• 2 ways of launching? While some may like it, I do not. I think it's an accessibility feature for people with bad eyesight, etc. In UIQ2 the top strip with app shortcuts was always there, giving you real UI consistency, like the Application Menu strip in the Mactintosh. Now here the shortcuts disappear as soon as you click on them.
• the browser still sub-par? enough of "kid's internet", already! iPhone will lead the pack then.

[chairstacker]

this would have been the phone to upgrade to.
But I just couldn't stand the horribly dysfunctional P990 any more and switched to the E61i. Back to Nokia after P800, P900, P910i - none of which deserved the P990 as their successor!

This phone is nothing compared to iPhone. And for whoever mentioned scratch resistant screen, get yourself an iPhone. As Steve himself said it, he has seen the future, and it looks like an iPhone. Enough said.

"As Steve himself said it, he has seen the future, and it looks like an iPhone."

Of course, that's exactly what he said. ha ha !!!

Just keep taking the tablets Macboy.

Zuber

[dgduris]

chairstacker,

Could be worse: After my P910a finally gave up the ghost I had to switch to an E62, which - great format aside - was sooo slow and S60 Series inflexible (original UIQ sure spoiled us). I have left for the Dark Side (Windows Mobile 5). It is not bad, it IS less stable than Symbian, but mostly the community just isn't as coherent as is the Symbian community - so it is hard to get good - and the latest - information easily.

C'mon SE!

[dgduris]

OH! And I have to add that all those years of people complaining about the difficulties getting symbian to sync with Outlook - I must say that Windows is certainly no more reliable in that area. Yes, categories do sync, which is great, but half the time I have to reset my phone to get Active Sync to find it.

I thought I type allaboutsymbian.com but some how it seems I stumbled upon allaboutiphone.com

Looks like there is no all things to all people phone out there. Everything seems to be a compromise somewhere, one day somebody will hit a winner.

Macboy, it's not an iPhone. An iPhone is a brilliant user interface, but a very ordinary phone. I've tried, it's fun to play with for 5 minutes, then I need something useful with decent online speed and doesn't make me look like a geek poking one palm with the other hand (as UIQ also does). It's also larger than I like.

As this comment list contains a lot of discussion about P1i compared to older Sony UIQ devices like P990, P910 etc, I don't understand the comment 'I stumbled on.... iPhone is a new phone out and it's valid to compare.