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Reading Hardware

Once every other year my cellphone company places a thick envelope in my mailbox. The envelope contains a standard letter thanking me for my loyalty, and a catalog of cell phones with a massive discount they offer me as a token of their eternal gratitude.
Actually I'm still very happy with my K800i, but who's to say no to a new top-notch phone for sixty bucks?

After two days of pondering, and since the one phone that causes instant ejaculation on nine out of ten male test persons probably won't be available until next year, I decided that I want a P1i. It lacks the xenon flash and the HSDPA capabilities of my phone's current successor, the K850i, but it's got a touch screen, a pseudo-QWERTY keyboard and much more software.

The first impression

The day after I placed my order via e-mail, I went home for lunch to find a small brown package waiting for me. Wow, that was quick. And the package's contents leave nothing to be desired:

The phone itself (who'd have thought it)
A charger
A USB cable
A cradle
A black suede case
A manual, dead tree edition, in four languages
A "VIP Support Card", i.e. a plastic thinggie with the SonyEricsson hotline's phone number on it (you've got a problem with your phone? Talk to an actual human who even knows how to help you!) - actually there were three of them in/for Switzerland's three different 'main' languages.
A 512MB Memory Stick™ - strangely enough, not made by Sony (as one would expect with a Sony Ericsson phone) but by SanDisk. My guess is that it's been added by my phone company.
Pre-printed address / postage labels and forms for warranty repair or such
A spare stylus (for the touch screen)

The phone itself looks and feels like quality - I've been spoiled by the K800i, but the P1i looks even more solid. The front is made of actual brushed aluminium, the back of silvery plastic. There are no cracks or anything similar that might cause the phone to creak later in its life.
The display is much larger than that of the K800, even though both displays are 240*320 pixels with 64k colours. Still it can accommodate more information at once, as the larger pixel size allows for smaller fonts.

When I first switch the phone on it goes through the usual "Welcome, select your language, what's your time zone, select a theme" process.

So far I'm officially impressed.

To be continued...

"God is dead." - Nietzsche, 1882 "Nietzsche is dead." - God, 1900

The word awkward comes to mind quite often during initial experiments with the touch screen, the keyboard and the user interface in general.

Input

The touch screen is great. You can tap on stuff with the stylus (or even with your fingers). The handwriting recognition works quite well too, although it's rather slow to write that way.
The numerous menus are navigated either with the touch screen or by a small wheel on the left side of the phone. Think "rotate & click"-style mouse wheel - Sony calls this technique Jog Dial™. Next to the wheel there's a cancel button. This combination works well, expect that it takes quite a bit of force to 'click' the wheel. I assume this is by design, so that you don't accidentally click on everything when you turn the wheel too fast.
The keyboard is a real feat. It boasts four rows of five keys each. The 12 keys in the middle are the usual 1-0, *, # keys. The special thing about these is that they're actually two keys - press the left side of the 1 key and you get an E, press the right side of the 1 key and you get an R, the left side of the 2 gives you a T, ... you get the picture. Basically you've got a real QUERTY (or QWERTZ, in Germany/Switzerland) keyboard.
While this is a great idea in theory, it's less revolutionary in practice when you hold the phone in both hands and your fat index fingers and thumbs fight for the space around the tiny keys. A lot of practice does help - I can already type much faster than a week ago when I got the phone. Of course there's no T9 text input anymore, but something similar to Motorola's approach - when you start typing, the phone will present you with a list of words in two languages of your choice plus whatever additional words you've typed in the past. Type the first few letters, hit OK/Enter and the phone completes the word.

The screen

There's really not much to say about the screen. It's 240 by 320 pixels large and 6.5cm (2 1/2 in) in diameter, well readable in the dark as well as in direct sunlight. The brightness can be adjusted (if you happen to find the right menu).

The user interface

The first few days there's always that feeling of 'awkward'. The phone's many options are sometimes confusing even to me, and I consider myself to be a serious power user and familiar with computers and tech gadgets. There's just too much stuff in too many different places. Eventually I've started discovering a system behind the seemingly random menus and buttons, and that system even appears to make sense, but it's still not exactly intuitive. Imagine a long-term Windows user's first UNIX experience with just manpages to help him get started.
(In all fairness, maybe I should have read the manual first. From what I've seen it's quite good. But still, the menus could be done better.)
While most of the 'awkward' things stop being awkward once you get the hang of them, be it the unusual keyboard or the menus, there are some genuine screw-ups. Luckily they're small things, such as the "Enable/disable PIN code" and "Change PIN code" functions being in different places, but they do contribute to the feeling that the phone's software library is the result of a "you got two hours, cram in as many features as you can, don't worry about ease of use!" contest.

The camera

The K800i was a Cyber-shot™ phone, so I'm really spoiled. Cyber-shot™ means that it boasts a quality 3.2 megapixel camera with auto-focus and a xenon flash. The P1i has the same camera, but with the standard LED 'flash' instead of the real thing, which means photographing things in the dark that are further from the camera than, say, 20cm, is Mission Impossible.
As a small compensation, the P1i can record MPEG4 videos at 320x240 and a decent quality.

Software

The P1i is one of SE's first phones to run on Symbian. This means that there's loads and loads of software available, both commercial and free. The phone comes with various document viewers (Office and PDF), two games and a few tools such as a calculator, stopwatch or Exchange ActiveSync thinggie. The built-in web browser is a full-featured version of Opera 8.65, which means I get to surf the web just like on a PC with a very small screen.

Connectivity

The P1i is a tri-band (GSM 900, 1800, 1900) and UMTS phone. It's not HSDPA capable though. In addition to that, it boasts a WLAN card. I haven't been able to get it to talk to my WLAN as of now - in theory it's simple enough: click Scan, tap on your WLAN in the list of networks discovered, enter a password if there's encryption. However, my phone always fails to connect. This will be a good occasion to test their hotline.

Cool features

Since my beloved K800i already did nearly everything I wanted/needed, this is mainly a comparison of these two phones.

When you connect the phone to the PC, it can act either as a P1i or as a USB memory stick, giving you full access to the installed memory card without any driver installation. The K800i had to reboot in order to act as a USB stick, the P1i can change between phone/stick mode dynamically.
Flight mode (all radio parts are disabled) can now also be enabled and disabled without switching the phone off and on again.
The K800i could emulate a USB network card with hi-speed (UMTS) internet access. The P1i appears to lack this very useful feature. In exchange, a full-featured Opera browser, e-mail client and VPN client are already installed on the phone, eliminating the need for a laptop in many cases.
Business card scanner: take a picture of a business card and the phone will create a new address book entry with the complete info from the card filled in. This actually works! (Provided the lighting is right)

Next: null calls Sony Ericsson VIP Support

"God is dead." - Nietzsche, 1882 "Nietzsche is dead." - God, 1900

This post was edited by null on May 06, 2008.

So I've been using my new phone for two months now and I'm happy to announce that it's quite easy to get used to the keyboard. The menus still don't make a lot of sense, but for everything I frequently need there's now a shortcut on the standby screen.

My main complaint now is that the whole thing is too fucking slow. Depending on what you've been doing when a new message arrives, it takes between three and seven seconds to switch to the messaging application, refresh the screen twice, change the current view to the inbox and then finally display the message. Switching between two active applications takes 3-4 seconds, and when the phone is very busy it drops some (but not all) keyboard or touchscreen clicks.
The phone can encode 15fps 320x240 MPEG4 movies at a reasonable quality in realtime, so one would assume that displaying a static piece of text isn't asking too much of the hardware. Which brings me to the conclusion that the software must be a piece of crap.

"The software is crap" is also a convenient explanation for the weekly forced reboots due to a freeze-up, the stash of crash dump files in phone memory, or when the camera application does nasty things to the screen in order to make it unusable for other applications, and then hangs indefinitely.
Then there are the small things, such as the calendar signalling appointments with the most annoying of all installed ringtones, despite the fact that it's set to 'silent' in the audio settings, or the occasional loss of audio/display settings in general after a reboot.

But I suppose that a crappy user interface is to be expected when you pick a UIQ/Symbian phone, so technically I should've known it.

I'm afraid I can't thus really recommend the phone anymore, and had I known this two months ago, I'd have opted for the K850i instead. Not so many cool apps and no touch screen, but a worthy successor of the K800i, a rock-solid phone with time-tested software and a real, high-quality camera.

"God is dead." - Nietzsche, 1882 "Nietzsche is dead." - God, 1900

This post was edited by null on Jul 02, 2008.

So I'm a sucker for eye candy (who isn't?) and am already much happier with my phone after building a custom theme. It even looks quite elegant if I'm allowed to say that of my own work:

Screenshot