Highly awaited as it is, Sony Ericsson P990 is going to be the flagship of the Sony Ericsson product line. Equipped with every possible current connectivity features, an autofocus 2 megapixel camera, a second video calls camera, a conventional keypad and a QWERTY keyboard, Memory Stick slot, FM radio with RDS, the latest Symbian 9.1 OS, and last, but not least with a large 2.76" TFT touchscreen with a QVGA (240x320 pixels) resolution it surely made the news for many impatiently waiting fans when it finally hit the market. The handset has a lot to offer, our job is to see if it's got what it takes to become a bestseller among the sophisticated smartphones which are now offered on the mobile market. UIQ interface inside out
The phone's interface is UIQ 3.0 which is a customizable pen-based user interface for media-rich mobile phones that is based on the Symbian OS 9.1 OS. The previous UIQ 2.0 and 2.1 versions supported flip-open mode only. UIQ 3.0 provides a user interface for flip-closed use as while still supporting flip-open input. The flip-open UI and the new flip-closed alternative are built on the same code base.
So the smartphone's interface essentially works in two modes - one when the flip closed and another one with the flip opened. The flip-closed mode actually gives you limited access to the device's functions. Not all menus are available and basically you are limited to using the handset as a general mobile phone only. With the flip-closed the touchcreen functionality of the display disappears. But opening the flip magically transforms it into full-function communication machine. This is the reason why all of our screenshots would picture the flip-opened mode. There are only few exceptions and they are used mainly to underline the difference between the two versions.
A nice thing is that the smartphone has a dedicated Flight mode which can be turned on seamlessly without even turning the phone off. 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. An added feature is that in Flight mode you can turn the Wi-Fi functionality on and make use of an airplane onboard hot-spot if there is one.
The standby screen of course has two views. In the flip-closed mode you can use the navigation D-pad in order to invoke user-preset shortcuts. Of course, the flip-opened mode is much more interesting. In this mode a shortcuts bar appears in the bottom of the screen. The items can be selected both with the stylus and your finger since the graphic icons are large enough. The shortcuts bar allows access to the events/shortcuts menu, the main menu, the phone application and the recent calls log.
An interesting addition to the standby screen in flip-opened mode is the menu we like to call the Start menu because it has a rather similar position as the START button on Windows. It gives you access to the most important items or actions you may need or like to do - like for example turn on connectivity options such as Bluetooth, Infrared, WLAN, or it allows you to make a new call, add a new contact or put down some appointments and notes. Further more 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 allows quick access to the most vital functions of a smartphone.
When setting up a wallpaper in order to freshen up your main screen you have to bear in mind that there are two different wallpapers for the two interface modes. So you should pick up two different wallpapers to match the resolution of the screen according to the flip state. A nice thing though is that there are numerous wallpapers that come preinstalled with the phone which in fact have two versions - one for the flip-opened mode and one for the flip-closed mode. It's a very nice thing to see form Sony Ericsson. Not only the wallpapers are very nice, but what is more you can always be sure that you would have that wallpaper that caught your eye on both your display modes.
The main menu of the Sony Ericsson P990 again has dual view according to the flip mode you are working in. Further more, it allows you several different views such as icons grid with or without text as well as a list view.
The smartphone interface can be customized through various graphic themes. Several of them come preinstalled while many more should be available online once the phone becomes publicly available.
Unlimited contacts
The Sony Ericsson offers an extensive phonebook designed to suit everybody's needs. There is virtually no limitation in the number of contacts that it can store. 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 default filter applied shows the contacts saved in the phone's memory. Generally speaking searching through your contacts is almost impossible without the stylus.
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, but unfortunately it doesn't get transferred to the Calendar. Interestingly enough though, when you enter a birthday in the Calendar the phone allows you associate it to one of your contacts and the date gets saved under the contacts details automatically.
You can even add a note for every contact. As usual the font size throughout the most of the smartphone's interface can be zoomed in. That's a great feature for people that no longer enjoy full-strength eyesight. Otherwise the smallest of the font sizes is pretty legible.
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 options. The first one is to set the smartphone to send a SMS with a predefined text whenever you have to reject a call. The second one is to automatically store a callback event in the calendar every time your reject a call. In case you choose that option you can set the how many minutes after the call should the call back event alert you.
All the messages in one Inbox
Usually the messaging department is one of strongest ones in any smartphone. Sony Ericsson P990 doesn't make any exception to the rule. It offers rich functions combined with several text-input options. Generally speaking, you can enter text with the numeric keypad the usual Multi-Tap way, use the QWERTY keyboard, use a virtual QWERTY keyboard with the stylus or simply write with the stylus on the screen. As regards handwriting recognition, the phone manages very well. The handwriting system used is CICs JotPro. Basically, the way it works, is you write numbers in the upper part of the screen and letters in the lower one. If you feel uncomfortable with it you can always turn on the virtual keyboard which is rather easy to use and offers different layouts. The Sony Ericsson P990 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. You can separately set whether you would like to use the predictive text input method in the flip-closed or the flip-opened mode, or both.
The messaging menu combines all messages in one inbox. The supported messages are SMS, EMS, MMS, email, and RSS feeds. The last one is available through a dedicated application. Writing a sms with the plethora of input methods available is rather easy. Furthermore you have a lot of emoticons to express graphically your feelings.
The email client is not really a separate application. It has extensive settings 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 P990 also supports Push Email through 3rd party applications from companies such as Extended Systems, Intellisync, JP Mobile, Research In Motion (RIM)/Blackberry, Active Sync, Seven, Smartner and Visto.
Writing an email is simple as writing a standard sms message. Usually 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.
A bunch of files
The Sony Ericsson P990 has 128MB flash memory and 64MB RAM. The amount of storage space for user files is around 80MB, which of course can be expanded by using a Memory Stick.
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 removable Memory Stick. 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 is more convenient through the Picture gallery. It offers almost the same folders & files interface as the file manager but it has some additional options as well as several view settings such as thumbnail view for example and slideshow.
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. Furthermore, you can set the smartphone to Auto-rotate your pictures in order to fit your viewing mode. Of course, you can zoom in the pictures to their original size and even more.
There is also a Picture Editor application that allows you to crop, rotate, resize, edit and correct images. You can use the editor to edit pictures directly in camera view mode or make corrective adjustment such as red eye removal or improve brightness levels.
The editor also includes fun layers, clip art and tools for drawing on the image using the stylus. Different pen sizes and colors are available, as well as a text tool for formatting and inserting text into the image.
The jukebox
The music player is the same as the one used in the Walkman-branded Sony Ericsson phones. It offers a nice interface and supports playlists with shuffle and loop options while offering rich equalizer presets including the Walkman MegaBass preset. Before creating a playlist, you can have the smartphone refresh the list of available music files.
The Video Player application offers basic functionality. A nice feature is that you can watch your videos in landscape mode. According to the manufacturer the Sony Ericsson is able to play smoothly videos with VGA resolution, captured at 30 fps which is more than enough to watch a music video or even a movie. Besides the usual mobile formats such as 3GPP, the smartphone supports MP3, AAC+, MPEG-4 and Real Audio 9 and RealMedia formats.
FM plus RDS
The stereo FM radio that the P990 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 equalizer presets available for the Music layer are available for the FM radio, too.
Sharp shooter
The camera used in Sony Ericsson P990 offers autofocus, a LED flash, a dedicated macro mode and image stabilizer for video recording. It's supposed to produce the same quality pictures as those by Sony Ericsson K750 which has one of the best cameras in the 2 megapixel class. Unfortunately, it seems that the testing unit we've got had some issues since the autofocus just didn't seem to work well over distances longer than several meters. Otherwise the macro shots produce nice and crisp images with great focus.
We won't comment on the picture quality since we are rather convinced that the final, retail version of the smartphone would have all that fixed. From what we see from the samples from Mobilmania.cz, P990 offers exactly the same picture quality as the popular 2 megapixel Sony Ericsson models - K750, W800, W810…
Otherwise the camera interface reminds a lot the interface of the latest Sony Ericsson phones. It has a rather similar graphics and functions but is completely redesigned. The highest resolution available is 1600x1200 pixels with three quality levels - Economy, Normal and Fine. 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 don't like the camera focus lag. The camera offers automatic white balance but there are 4 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.
The P990 camera can capture video with a maximal resolution of 320x240 pixels at 15 fps which is not much considering that 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. Lower resolutions allows recording at 30 fps. The output files are recorder either in 3GPP or MPEG-4 format. The video capturing is a serious downside for a smartphone intended to be best-of-class such as Sony Ericsson P990. You can choose whether you would like your videos recorded with sound or not and you can limit their length in order to fit them in an MMS. Otherwise the video recording time is limited by the available memory only.
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 speaking, when it comes to video calls, the P990 Video phone application manages well enough.
Plug in or log on
When it comes to connecting the 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. Connecting the smartphone to a PC via the Bluetooth worked like a charm. One of the innovations about the Bluetooth capabilities is the support for Bluetooth LAN. Generally, that means that a TCP/IP connection can be established between the P990 and the computer over the Bluetooth serial link (where Bluetooth acts as a serial cable replacement). This solution is normally used for the purposes of Backup/Restore and Sync, but can also be used in a more generic sense like for example route the HTTP traffic of the Opera web browser through the computer internet connection.
It must be noted that the Bluetooth capabilities of the device include also support for the A2DP profile which allows you to use a stereo Bluetooth headset for listening to music.
What is more, the P990 has even VPN support which can be used to hook the smartphone on corporate WLAN networks. Synchronization with the PC or remote server via SyncML also works seamlessly. The user can choose which items should be synchronized and which not.
Besides Infrared and Bluetooth, the P990 has tri-band GSM/UMTS support (GSM 900/1800/1900) and also supports GPRS for fast data transfers in non-3G enabled networks. EDGE (the so-called E-GPRS) support lacks here. Adding the support for Wi-Fi (WLAN) 802.11b to the equation really makes the P990 a competitive communication device. Searching and logging to available WLAN networks worked seamlessly. It must be noted that searching for WLAN networks frequently has a hard impact on the battery life.
The Sony Ericsson P990 comes equipped with the famous 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. The browser is used with the flip open. Users can quickly and easily switch between portrait and landscape modes as well as change from a normal view with scroll bars to a full screen view. Users can use the Fit-to-screen option to reformat pages to fit inside the screen width and eliminate the need for horizontal scrolling. We are pretty happy with the browser capabilities but it must be noted that the Web browser that comes with the Nokia Symbian smartphones with the S60 3rd edition user interface outperforms it with ease.
Day-to-day management
The Alarms application 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 2 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 get repeated automatically through the years.
As 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. When using the regular input method, the predictive text input mode is available.
The P990 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 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 lower right angle of the screen almost throughout the whole smartphone interface. You probably have noticed that on almost all of our screenshots. It can also be opened via the so-called Start menu. Unfortunately, the icon itself is so small that the only way to press it is by using the stylus - unless of course you haven't assigned the right side Web button as a shortcut key for starting the Task manager.
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 Activity menu as well as access to the recently us application. The second tab of the Task Manager contains all the currently running applications and allows you to easily terminate them.
Office applications
Being a business smartphone, the Sony Ericsson comes with several preinstalled specialized office applications. They include the Quickoffice group which is a combined editor for MS Word (Quickword), MS Excel (Quicksheet), and MS PowerPoint (QuickPoint) documents. The Quickoffice group also comes with its own file manager which shows a list of all stored Office documents. There is also the option to filter the list furthermore via the available tabs and show the WORD, EXCEL and POWERPOINT documents separately.
The office applications also include a PDF files viewer called PDF+. In the end it does its job well, but it's rather slower than the PDF viewer that comes preinstalled with the Nokia E-Series smartphones. As a general rule, viewing a PDF document on any mobile screen is a refined torture which involves a lot of scrolling in all directions.
A nice and rather innovative business application is the business card scanner. It allows you to capture a person's business card with the main camera, scan it and via character recognition insert all the information into a new contact in the phonebook. Furthermore, the business card image is stored as the person's personal picture that would be shown when you get a call from that contact. Our test with the business cards that we had available proved that the application does a great job and manages to recognize all the types of fonts used. The output is a really detailed contact entry which is ready to be saved in the phonebook.
Truly amazing gaming
The Sony Ericsson P990 comes with two preinstalled games. The first one is the Java-based Tetris-like QuadraPop game seen on many other Sony Ericsson phones. Generally, it's meant to be played in the flip-closed mode. Unfortunately, obviously due to an OS bug, we couldn't make it start.
Never mind, the second game is far more interesting not only as gameplay, but also as a technology showcase. The Sony Ericsson is among the few phones that have a true graphics hardware accelerator and the Vijay Singh Pro Golf 2005 game is specially developed by Gameloft in order to show its capabilities. We must admit that it 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
Well, all we can say is that the Sony Ericsson P990 is an excellent smartphone and if you need one you should definitely consider it when making your buying decision. When all the software bugs are worked out, the end product would be a device which hardly has any serious flaws.
The competing HTC TyTN (a.k.a. Qtek 9600) and the Nokia E70 are rather good choices, too, so make your mind rather carefully when choosing the device that's right for you.
When considering some of the competing smartphones with QWERTY keyboards, bear in mind that the obvious advantage of P990 - its touchscreen might turn out to be its most obvious drawback in the first days of usage. The Series 60 user interface is usually a lot easier to get used to even for an inexperienced user. The UIQ 3.0 interface would create many inconveniences for a novice. You would have to use the stylus all the time and while it may seem easy, in fact it demands that both your hands are free which may not always be the case. With the flip opened, you can hardly dial a number, for example, without concentrating your whole attention to the smartphone's screen while many of the functions require that you open the flip in order to use them. So in the end, it's a bit of trade-off. And where you stand is entirely up to you.
