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The P800 is dead - long live the P900 - review posted

You'll have gathered that not everybody liked Sony Ericsson's P800 smartphone. Now, there's a chance for the company to redeem itself with that smartphone's successor - because the P900 is out, and it's been reviewed.

The review that matters is probably the long one posted by Michael Oryl (editor of MobileBurn) - and he thinks it's "sweet". Is sweet good enough? Or does this hand "best in class" over to either Palm or Microsoft?

Oryl's review, describing the phone's appearance ("nicely sculpted and has a brushed metal like finish to it") and innovative gadgets ("wonderful 5-way jog-dial, located on the upper left side of the phone") and its audio ("a fairly powerful speaker located on the rear of the device ... is used for cranking out both some very nice polyphonic ringtones and MP3 files") falls short of genuine enthusiasm.

"Of course, more than anything, the P900 has to function as a phone. This is where the most compromises have been made, in my opinion. P800 owners will already be aware of most all of these, and probably disappointed that they have not been addressed," summarises Oryl.

His pleased,but not really excited review comes only two days after The Inquirer's Tony Dennis slated the old P800 - basically, for being too big - and said that users should wait for the new one.

Sony Ericsson will be hoping for more enthusiasm from other reviewers. They will feel there are possibly too many comments along these lines: "The P900 supports both the Headset and Hands Free profiles, as best I can tell by watching the phone's behaviour. Multiple Hands Free devices could be paired at the same time (HBH-65, HBH-60, HHB-500), and sometimes I could switch between them easily. But most of the time I could not ... " - which won't look good in the press clippings book.

"Worse yet, [Oryl continues] most of the time once one of them was turned off I would need to remove and re-pair it [ pair it again] to get it to work again, at the expense of any other headsets that were paired. And still worse, when the phone was configured to be the preferred audio device, instead of the headset, I crashed the phone every time I tried to transfer the sound to the headset by hitting the headset's dial button."

The headset he says, would try to connect, "and you would see the connection state on the P900's display, but nothing would happen. After some number of seconds, the phone would reboot."

The phone isn't based on the rival Nokia design version of the Symbian platform, and so a lot of PDA users will automatically say it's better. And we can expect those who don't like Nokia to leap to the SE P900's defence quite quickly. But the bottom line appears to be - disappointing.

There is hope, though. The unit reviewed in Mobileburn's pages is an early one, with software that is not quite final. So maybe shipping quality software will fix these little reboot bugs.

And using the phone as a modem - that is, connecting it to a PC, and "dialling out" over GPRS - worked just fine. Also, the ability to make video clips - that's a new feature, and Oryl liked it.

Well, video is video, but there's a limit to how good it can get on a phone. Oryl has posted a sample video at about page 14 of his "Longest. Review. Ever. The P900."

As you'll see, it's not brilliant quality video, but it is nonetheless 349Kbytes of data. To play it, you'll need to download six megabytes of Philips MP4 player, too.

As if to compound the bad timing, there's a distinctly fervent enthusiasm to Andrew Orlowski's review of the rival Handspring Treo600 smartphone, based on the Palm OS. "Handspring's second generation smartphone is a marvel of good hardware and human interface design." That's what Sony Ericsson will want.

The video player download is worth it, I think. So are all 20 of Michael's pages, especially if you want huge, high-res images. But I think fans of the Symbian platform may be anxious, at the end of it. And don't ask me about the quality of the P900's camera ...