The Sony Ericsson P1 is an exciting new smartphone that is to undoubtedly reign in the current Sony Ericsson portfolio. Powered by Symbian OS and featuring a QWERTY keyboard, a touchscreen TFT display with QVGA resolution and a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus, it represents the next level of the development of UIQ smartphones. As such, it seems that the Sony Ericsson P1 will be the flagship of Sony Ericsson smartphone line overrunning even the Sony Ericsson P990 and we were more than curious to find out how it performed in real life.
Key features:
- Symbian 9.1 OS with UIQ 3 user interface
- QWERTY keyboard
- 2.6″ 262K colors TFT touchscreen display
- 3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus
- Memory Stick Micro M2 memory card slot
- UMTS, Wi-Fi, stereo Bluetooth, USB, Infrared
- Secondary camera for video calls
- Walkman-grade MP3 player and FM radio with RDS
- Jog Dial navigation
Main disadvantages:
- Awkward keyboard
- No HSDPA support
- No EDGE support
A P-series or a M-series one?
The Sony Ericsson P1 bears the design line of the already available Sony Ericsson M600. The same form factor but without a QWERTY keyboard was used in the music-oriented Sony Ericsson W950, too.
Naming the device P1 seems rather logical, since the next SE super smartphone should have come as P1000. But 1000 sounds really trite, so choosing the device model to be P1, is a good move. Rumors had it that the device would be called P700, and even our test handset reported being P700. We guess that the decision must have been taken in the last moment. The Sony Ericsson P1 seems more of an upgraded M600, but then again we suppose that the wide range of features it boasts motivated including it in the P-series. So the P1 would definitely be the flagship among Sony Ericsson smartphones, but hardware wise, it seems to be powered by the same 208 MHz processor as seen in M600, W950 and P990.
The P-series evolution
We were very excited when we got the opportunity to make a review of the eagerly awaited Sony Ericsson smartphone P1. It turned out though that the test handset is obviously a rather early prototype since we experienced frequent crashes in various situations and applications. Nevertheless, we have a great deal of confidence that these will be fixed in the final version.
The retail package will include a desk stand, a USB cable, a stereo headset, a protective pouch, a spare stylus, and a 512MB Memory Stick Micro M2 card. Of course, as with any other mobile phone, the contents of the retail package remain strictly market and country dependant.
The Sony Ericsson P1 is an exciting new smartphone that is to undoubtedly reign in the current Sony Ericsson portfolio. Powered by Symbian OS and featuring a QWERTY keyboard, a touchscreen TFT display with QVGA resolution and a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus, it represents the next level of the development of UIQ smartphones.
Silver framed
The P1 smartphone measures 106 x 55 x 17 mm and weighs 124 g. The central place in the body is taken by the large 2.6″ touchscreen TFT display. Above the display you can easily see the eye of the frontal VGA video call camera. Next to it, right in the dead center is the in-call speaker grill. Below it is the QWERTY keyboard that is almost a Sony Ericsson trademark – we haven’t seen a similar design in the common mobile market. Three or four characters share each key and it depends on your pressing its left or right side or pressing it in a combination with the ALT key, that determines which character gets printed. A clever design, no doubt about it, but we would see if it’s user-friendly enough to serve its purpose.
The left side of the Sony Ericsson P1 features a hand strap eyelet, a Jog Dial and a hardware back key, which comes in handy when used in combination with the Jog Dial. The Jog Dial wheel itself is a three-way navigation solution – scroll up, scroll down and press to select or activate.
The bottom side of the device is bare – it hosts only the usual Fast port and a microphone aperture.
The right side incorporates the camera shutter key, the Memory Stick Micro card slot and a shortcut key, which can be assigned several available applications. The default one is to start the Web browser.
The top side of the device features the Infrared port and the On/Off key.
Just below the On/Off key is the slot for the stylus. It’s more obvious when you take a look at the back of the handset.
Speaking of the back, there is a certain thing down there that can really attract your attention. We are talking about the lens of the 3.2 megapixel camera which features autofocus and as you may have probably noticed, a dual LED flash. We saw that kind of flash used in Sony Ericsson K550. Obviously, Sony Ericsson are keeping the xenon flash for their high-end cameraphones only. Right above the camera lens is a silver line that in fact covers the loudspeaker.
When you remove the battery cover, you will see the standard Sony Ericsson BST-33 950 mAh Li-Polymer battery that is rather frequently used by the manufacturer in a number of different handsets. According to official numbers, the battery should provide the P1 with enough power to keep it going for up to 350-440 hours of standby time or up to 5-10 hours of call time depending on whether you would use it in a UMTS network which takes its toll on battery life. Unfortunately, we could not test the phone’s battery life since we used the phone heavily during our tests and thus the battery life we experienced was not indicative for the real-life performance of the handset. The SIM card slot of the P1 is not your regular Sony Ericsson one and the card itself slots into a place next to the camera lens.
The Sony Ericsson P1 is nice to work with both your left and right hand. If you use the Jog Dial you would need the stylus rarely since it represents a rather adequate navigation solution. We enjoyed using the P1 and it surely feels nice when held in hand.
The Sony Ericsson P1 has a nice 2.6″ touchscreen 262K color TFT display with a QVGA resolution. It deals well under direct sunlight – we have seen worse performance by high-end mobiles by other manufacturers. It must be noted that, when it comes to performance under bright sunlight… Let’s just say that in this respect Nokia have been doing some really great work lately – their displays are among the best ones we’ve seen – both on smartphones and feature phones.
The QWERTY keyboard user-friendliness is entirely another matter. Our team is usually fond of QWERTY keyboards – and that’s not because we are tech geeks, or at least that is not the only reason. QWERTY keyboards are our favorites when typing emails, plain messages or just putting down notes. We’ve seen them come in different styles and flavors, but more than often we can get used to their peculiarities in no time and you could found us speeding down the texting highway. Well, the P1 is nowhere near that when it comes to user-friendliness and ergonomics. After a week of testing, we still couldn’t come close to the typing speed of a regular multi-tap feature phone, let alone anywhere near the one of a real QWERTY keyboard.
Sorry to say that, but since we’ve never had the chance to review the Sony Ericsson M600 ourselves, this is the first time we encounter the half-QWERTY, half-TORTURE keyboard solution Sony Ericsson has to offer. After we had a taste of the great Nokia E61i QWERTY keyboard last week, we were more than disappointed at the Sony Ericsson one.
Telephoning
As anyone could expect, Sony Ericsson P1 offers nice signal reception strength and we found no problems during calls. The vibration is on a medium level – the same goes for the ringing volume. However, we are satisfied with how clear the sound is.
The beast within
The phone’s interface is UIQ 3.0, which is a customizable stylus-based user interface for mobile phones that is based on the Symbian 9.1 OS. Besides regular clock, date, signal strength and battery meter, the standby mode offers the user a Today screen and a customizable shortcuts bar. The Today screen shows current Calendar events, message and email inbox, missed calls, general notes, etc.
By default the shortcuts bar allows access to the Calendar, the phonebook, the web browser, the message inbox and the main menu. The shortcut items can be selected with the stylus as well as with your finger since the graphic icons are large enough for the purpose. A new thing we have not seen in previous Sony Ericsson UIQ smartphones is the ability to expand the shortcuts bar by pressing the grey arrow over the shortcuts. Thus, you gain access to 10 more empty slots for shortcuts.
The Sony Ericsson P1 deals well with RAM management – a thing Sony Ericsson M600 is not always brilliant at. Almost at all times, there are at least 40-50 MB available to the user even after Transitions have been turned on. Although only a beta version, we certainly find the P1 user interface as fast at least as the competition’s S60 user interface. No doubt Sony Ericsson have learned their lesson and have doubled the available on-board RAM as compared to P990 and W950.
On the standby screen, there are two pop-up menus. The first one can be invoked by the More softkey and the second one can be opened by pressing with the stylus the triangle in the upper left corner. The first one offers the option to turn on a connectivity feature, change the volume, view the smartphone’s status, and allows access to a call management option for filtering incoming calls. The latter one gives you access to the most important items or actions you may need or like to do – for example turn on connectivity options such as Bluetooth or Infrared, make a new call, add a new contact or put down some appointments and notes. Furthermore, it gives you access to the dual time zone clock and allows you to control the volume level for different events centrally. We are very pleased with this menu since it allows quick access to the most important functions of any smartphone.
A nice thing is that the smartphone has a dedicated Flight mode, which can be turned on seamlessly without even restarting the phone. Even if you have to turn it off for some reason, there is an option that the phone asks you whether you want to start it directly into Flight mode.
The main menu of the Sony Ericsson P1 allows you two different views such as icons grid or list view. The font throughout the user interface is customizable – there are three available levels.
The smartphone interface is customizable through various graphic themes – unfortunately, ours had only the default one preinstalled.
Your magic book
The Sony Ericsson P1 offers an extensive phonebook designed to suit everybody’s needs. It can store unlimited amount of numbers. You can choose to filter your contacts by groups; by the location, they are saved at; or separate them into individual folders that later on you can use for calls management.
The details that you can save for a given contact are abundant and include several numbers and email addresses, job title, office and home postal addresses, voice commands for the individual phone numbers of the contact and finally you can associate a ringtone and a picture to the specific contact. There is a field to enter the contact’s birthday and the entered date gets transferred to the Calendar. Much like the smartphones based on S60 user interface you can add your own custom fields here, too.
Call management
The Call log lists store all the information about the calls received or made. Now, when it comes to call management, besides call filtering there are also two nice things that the P1 can do for you. The first one is to send an SMS with a predefined text to the person whose call you are rejecting. The second one is to automatically store a callback event in the calendar every time you reject a call. In case you opt for that, you can set how many minutes after the call the call back event should remind you of the call.
Tap, tap…
Usually the messaging department is one of strongest ones in any smartphone. Sony Ericsson P1 doesn’t make any exception to the rule. It offers rich functions combined with several text-input options. You can enter text with the QWERTY keyboard, use a virtual on-screen QWERTY keyboard with the stylus or simply write with the stylus on the touchscreen display. As regards handwriting recognition, the phone manages very well. The Sony Ericsson P1 also offers an enhanced version of the T9 dictionary – its thesaurus is expandable – you can add your own words and it can even remember whole messages.
The messaging menu combines all messages in one inbox. The supported messages are SMS, EMS, MMS, and RSS feeds. The last one is available through a dedicated application. Emails have their own separate Inbox for every single account. Writing a message with the plethora of input methods available is rather easy. Furthermore, you have many emoticons to express your feelings graphically.
The font size can be varied according to your needs. A lot of editing options are available to your disposal, too.
The email client is not really a separate application. It has extensive options but setting it up to work with your email account is rather easy. It supports the POP3, IMAP and SMTP protocols, as well as SSL and TLS encryption. The P1 has support for various email providers such as AlteXia, Intellisync, Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, BlackBerry Connect, Seven, Sybase/iAnywhere, and Visto.
Writing an email is as simple as writing a standard sms message. By default the client downloads only the email headers or you can set it up to automatically download the whole messages if they don’t exceed a predefined limit in kilobytes. Adding an attachment is easy as usual – all you have to do is open the corresponding tab in the “new email” editor.
Managing your possessions
The Sony Ericsson P1 has 166MB of flash memory and 128MB RAM. Storage memory is expandable by using the Memory Stick Micro M2 slot.
The smartphone offers a nice file manager, which resembles a lot the interface of the file managers of Sony Ericsson non-OS phones. It has two tabs – one showing the folders in the phone’s memory (no system files visible) and another one showing the files and folders on the memory card. You can mark multiple files or folders and then copy, move or send them to another device. There is full support for DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection. It can be applied to all types of multimedia content such as audio, video, images and Java midlets.
Browsing through pictures though is much easier through the Picture gallery application. It offers almost the same folders & files interface as the file manager but it has some additional options as well as several view settings. You can browse the pictures in portrait or landscape mode. You can also set whether you want the pictures in portrait mode to be seen fullscreen. When browsing in landscape mode the fullscreen is the only available option. Of course, you can zoom in the pictures to their original size and even more. When zooming, a mini-map appears which allows you to see which picture area you are looking at.
The music player is the same as the one used in the Walkman-branded Sony Ericsson phones. It supports playlists with shuffle and loop options while offering the usual equalizer presets including the Walkman MegaBass one. It’s worth noting that Sony Ericsson W950 is equipped with a better player, which has many additional options, but the P1 player surely does not disappoint either. There are no graphic visualizations but you can view album art, as long as you put the cover in the album folder. One of the coolest things about the player is that you can scroll through your tracks a lot easier using the side Jog Dial.
The Video Player application offers nice functionality. You can watch your videos in landscape mode at fullscreen view. The P1 has support for streaming H.264 video content so you can surely watch high-quality streaming TV on it.
The stereo FM radio that the Sony Ericsson P1 is equipped with supports RDS and can store up to 20 radio stations. If the radio station has RDS broadcasts, it gets stored in the phone’s memory with its name. The radio is equipped with the TrackID function that allows you record several seconds of a song you are listening to, match it against Gracenote’s server database and return you the name and artist. As we have seen in so many other Sony Ericsson phones, the service is reliable in around 50% of the cases.
A snap or more…
The Sony Ericsson P1 is equipped with a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus and a dual-LED flash. It has a dedicated macro mode, which produces nice and crisp images with great focus.
We won’t comment much on the picture quality since we are rather convinced that the final, retail version of the smartphone would have the camera quality improved. We now can see that P1 shows good resolution, but the automatic white balance is unreliable. Nevertheless, we still find these samples good enough to share them with you. We expect that when launched Sony Ericsson P1 will produce images almost as good as K800/K810 models. The lack of the famous Cybershot logo is not something to mourn about. However, we think that the UIQ3 camera interface will never be as responsive as the one of the abovementioned models.
The camera interface reminds a lot the interface of the latest Sony Ericsson phones and has a rather similar graphics and functions, but unfortunately is not as snappy as the one used in their feature phones. The highest resolution available is 2048 x 1536 pixels, which practically shows that the 3.2 megapixel sign on the camera is a marketing gimmick as the real resolution of the photos is 3 megapixel. There are three quality levels and the camera has a full automatic exposure control but offers nice manual overexposure control accessible from the main viewfinder interface.
As we already mentioned, the autofocus has a dedicated macro mode. You can even turn the autofocus off and use a fixed focal length in case you do not like the camera focus lag. The camera offers automatic white balance but there are four other presets you can choose from, depending on the environment. There are several color effects you can apply to the pictures and video, such as Black & white, Sepia, Solarization and Negative.
Similarly to Sony Ericsson P990, the Sony Ericsson P1 can capture video with a maximal resolution of 320 x 240 pixels at 15 fps. There are mobile phones on the market capable of recording video in VGA resolution – not to mention the Nokia N93, which captures VGA resolution videos at 30 fps while providing full smartphone capabilities. This resolution might be considered somewhat adequate if it wasn’t for the low frame rate. Lower resolutions though allow recording at 30 fps. The output files are recorded in either 3GPP or MPEG-4 format. The video recording time is limited by the available memory only.
The video capturing is a serious downside for a smartphone intended to be an all-in-one multimedia device such as Sony Ericsson P1.
Using the front VGA video calls camera was easy since it offers a rather intuitive interface. A nice thing is that you choose the rear main camera for video calls, which practically means that you can show the other call party your surroundings with an ease. The video calls camera also has a dedicated Night mode. Generally, when it comes to video calls, the P1 Video phone application manages well enough.
3G comes easy
When it comes to connecting the Sony Ericsson P1 smartphone to a computer or other devices, you have various options. You can use the integrated Infrared port, a USB cable or the Bluetooth 2.0 functionality. Connecting the smartphone to a PC via the Bluetooth worked like a charm. The Bluetooth capabilities of the device include support for the A2DP profile, which allows you to use a stereo Bluetooth headset for listening to music.
Synchronization with the PC or remote server via SyncML also works seamlessly. The user can choose items to be synchronized.
Besides Infrared and Bluetooth, the P1 has tri-band GSM/UMTS support (GSM 900/1800/1900) and supports GPRS for fast data transfers in non-3G enabled networks. EDGE support lacks here as it does in previous smartphones. The Wi-Fi support is among its great advantages too. The integrated connection manager does pretty well with managing the available connection you have set. For example, when you have several connectivity accounts available at the same time, such as Bluetooth, WLAN and UMTS, you can set priority over their usage according to your wishes. This is something that S60 user interface smartphones are unable to offer.
The Sony Ericsson P1 comes equipped with the Opera 8.0 Web browser, which has made a reputation as one of the best for mobile devices. It supports HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, frames, CSS, and TSL and SSL security protocols. It’s not on par with the Nokia web browser but it surely renders pages fast enough and offers rich view options.
Users can quickly and easily switch between portrait and landscape modes as well as change from a windowed view to a fullscreen view. Furthermore, you can use the Text mode option to reformat pages to exclude pictures and thus save some of those precious megabytes you pay your network carrier for. A nice feature is the Find option, which allows you to search a text string in the page you have opened. You can hardly see that in other mobile browsers.
Your planner
The Alarms are part of the Time application, we already wrote about. It is nothing special really but it does its job more than satisfactory. You can set a ringtone of your choice as an Alarm sound or you can have a given radio station to wake you.
The functionality of the Calendar application is at a good level. You can choose between monthly, weekly and daily view and two time zones. The available events that you can store are Appointment, Reminder, All day event, and Anniversary. The birthday can be recorded as an Anniversary event since those events are repeated automatically through the years. There are a lot of user-configurable options at your disposal.
As with any other Sony Ericsson phones you have two other applications to organize your daily routine – that is the Tasks and Notes applications. The Task one allows you to enter simple events that do not require extensive setups as the ones in the Calendar. The Notes application allows saving short notes as the name itself implies. The interesting thing here is that the notes can be in handwritten form.
The P1 also offers a nicely designed Calculator, Unit converter and a Sound Recorder with a recording time only limited by the available memory. Sony Ericsson has decided to leave the MusicDJ application seen on almost all of their mobile phones – it allows you to create polyphonic ringtones within a simple user interface. For an unknown reason the VideoDJ application seen on some of the latest Sony Ericsson mobiles also lacks here.
Maybe this is the most appropriate place to say a few things about the Task Manager, which is something of a separate application although fully integrated into the OS. The Task Manager icon is available in the upper right angle of the screen almost throughout the whole smartphone interface. You probably have noticed that on almost all of our screenshots. Unfortunately, the icon itself is so small that the only way to press it is by using the stylus.
The Task Manager has two tabs – the first and default one, which you see whenever you open the Manager contains shortcuts to the Main Menu and the Standby as well as access to the recently used application. The second tab of the Task Manager contains all the currently running applications and allows you to terminate them – unfortunately only one by one.
The Sony Ericsson P1 also comes with the Quickoffice application, which would allow it to open and even edit MS Word, MS Excel and MS Powerpoint documents. The PDF+ application allows reading of PDF files. However, it renders files rather too slowly – not anything like the Acrobat Reader LE we saw in Nokia E61i.
Let’s do some golfing
The Sony Ericsson P1 comes with two preinstalled games. The first one is the Java-based Tetris-like QuadraPop game seen on many other Sony Ericsson phones. The second game is Vijay Singh Pro Golf 3D, which you might have seen on Sony Ericsson P990. It was first developed by Gameloft in order to show the capabilities of the true graphics hardware accelerator, present in P990. Obviously similar hardware is used in P1, too. We must admit that the game boasts stunning graphics and animation – that is for a mobile phone, of course. It offers seamless shifts between camera angles and your viewpoint shifts at least twice on every stroke, highlighting different parts of the shot.
Final words
Summing it up, the Sony Ericsson P1 offers more than every other Sony Ericsson smartphone before. Positive changes are noticeable both in system performance and in the hardware equipment. In terms of software, the handset is identical to the previous UIQ 3 handsets and when compared to Nokia S60 smartphones it does lose only on Internet calls capabilities, which are much more developed in the latest S60 mobiles. Apart from that, the Sony Ericsson P1 could have put up a very good fight with every competing messenger device currently on the market if it were not for the inconvenient keyboard solution.
Whether you should choose UIQ for your next smartphone is a matter of discussion and according to us the most controversial point of argument should be the touchscreen functionality. We feel that the toll it takes on navigation usability is greater than the added benefit of handwriting recognition, which is the only feature that really can justify the use of a stylus. Somehow, the smartphone platform cannot really use the stylus efficiently as much as PocketPC does and it turns into more of a deterrent since you have to use both your hands to do things you could have easily done with a simple joystick or a D-pad if one was available.
The Walkman player features an Equalizer with Bass and Mega Bass, Stereo Widening for extra round sound and Visual Settings that create psychedelic twirls on the screen as the music plays. New skins can be added to freshen the look of the player.
With a scant 12 MB of internal memory, W580i users will need to use Memory Stick Micro memory cards for any reasonable multimedia capabilities. Fortunately the W580i comes with a 256 MB card; not a lot of memory, but able to store 50+ songs.
