Sony Ericsson P800

Sony Ericsson's P800 is the most hyped smartphone this century and, after a few months' delay, it has finally arrived.

The delay allowed Bill Gates to get in on the smartphone act first. Orange's Windows-powered SPV phone is mightily impressive, so Sony Ericsson has to pull something special out of its hat to beat it.

The P800 runs on the major rival to Microsoft's phone OS, written by Symbian, which is owned by manufacturers such as Nokia and Motorola, plus Sony Ericsson of course.

On paper, and to an extent in practice, the P800's Symbian is superior. It contains all the main features touted by Microsoft, including email, internet and Wap browsing, address book, task manager, jotter, calendar, video and audio player, voice recorder and, obviously, the ability to make voice calls.

But it has others that features Microsoft lacks, such as support for Bluetooth and Java applications such as games.

Menus have the edge when it comes to the phone side of things, although that's possibly because they follow patterns we're more familiar with. Making a call, sending a text message, sending and receiving an email and so on is very simple and fast.

Finding some of the more advanced features is more troublesome, however. There's no T9 text recongition, which is an inexcusable omission. Sony Ericsson has employed a system of icons, as opposed to Microsoft's simple numbered lists.

The P800 is more responsive than Orange's SPV, which we found had a tendency to stutter to a halt at times. Video playback is also a little smoother.

The P800 differs from Orange's SPV in that it has a touchscreen. Part of this is covered with a keypad flip, which when closed makes the P800 look like a normal mobile phone.

You can control all the functions using the keypad on the flip, together with the five-way jogdial at the side, although it's a bit awkward.

Open the flip and the P800 goes into 'PDA mode' where you use the touchscreen, which is much easier. There's a small stylus provided for this, although it's likely you'll lose it quickly; it's a good job there are three spares.

There's 12MB of memory for storing data and applications, plus a Memory Stick Duo card for expansion. These cards are roughly the same size as a Secure Digital (SD) card, and are available in sizes up to 16MB, one of which comes with the phone.

But when it comes to synchronising a phone with a PC, nothing can beat Microsoft. Sony Ericsson's software can synchronise email, calendar dates, addresses, tasks and notes with Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, but it's fiddly to set up compared to Activesync. Plus, there's no free copy of Outlook here either.

The integrated digital camera is better than Orange's add-on one, which, on our review model, suffered from slow screen updates. A picture of the person calling can appear on the screen and you can send picture messages to compatible phones.

So far, any problems we've had with the P800 can be easily ignored. But one that can't is its physical presence. It is 13mm wider than the SPV, and 5mm deeper, which doesn't sound like a lot but it gets on your nerves if you hold the phone up to your ear for too long. A stereo hands-free kit is provided, but that's not the point.

One thing we can't knock though is the battery life, which is claimed as 13 hours of talk time, and we've seen nothing to dispute that.

This is quite a difficult product to rate. As soon as we find one feature we prefer over the SPV, a problem comes along to balance things out. Although the P800 is better as a phone than the SPV it is worse as a PDA. However, the extra bulk of the P800 unfortunately loses it a point.

DETAILS
Price: £250 approx. with contract (£212.77 ex VAT); £550 approx. without contract (£468.09)
Contact: Sony Ericsson 08705 237 237
www.sonyericsson.com/uk

SPECS

• Flip closed: 40 x 28mm, 208 x 144 pixels; Flip open: 40 x 61mm, 208 x 320 pixels
• Symbian v7.0 OS
• Triband GPRS
• Memory Stick Duo card slot
• Arm 9 156MHz processor
• 12MB of Flash Rom
• Infrared, Bluetooth or USB connection
• Integrated 640 x 480 digital camera

See also:

Motorola T720

A smart mobile phone with appealing features. Let the games commence!  31 Jan 2003

Nokia 7650

Is it a phone, a digital camera or a PDA? Nokia's 7650 tries to be all three.  15 Nov 2002

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