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HelpSony Ericsson P1 review
By Michell Bak, 8th of March 2008
The Sony Ericsson P1 is Sony Ericsson’s first smart phone in a smaller physical size than ever before. It’s approximately 25% smaller than its predecessor, the P990, and with a weight just below 125 grams, it’s also about 30 grams lighter. Furthermore, Sony Ericsson put in twice the amount of RAM memory, which means about 4 times the work memory as on P990. The QWERTY keyboard has of course remained, but has now been embedded into a two-key system, also used on the M600 messaging smart phone. P1 feels great in hand, and is built like a phone from the good old days.
In this review, we’ll be focusing more on the business aspect of things rather than the entertainment department. For more details on entertainment, and general other general stuff, please read our in-depth going W960 review. Furthermore, some parts of the review might be like our W960 review due to the fact that they’re almost identical hardware and software wise.
Official product pictures of Sony Ericsson P1
Advantages
- 3G connection & WLAN
- Large 2.6 inch touch screen
- 128 megabytes of RAM memory
- UIQ 3.0 – enhanced and stable
- 512 MB M2 card comes with the phone
- QWERTY keyboard is excellent
- Classy and professional looking design
- Bluetooth GPS & software included (depends on region)
Disadvantages
- No EDGE and HSDPA
- Limited hardware
- Single hand use is limited
- Display is vulnerable to scratches
The obvious comparison to make, would be a P990 versus the P1. As said earlier on, the P1 is quite a lot smaller than the P990, and weighs a good 30 grams less as well. The keyboard feels much better to use (after some practising), and the format is generally a lot better. Build quality is a lot better than on the P990, and also compared to the W960, which would be another obvious phone to compare it to.
The retail package includes a large set of nice accessories, such as a USB cradle and the Bluetooth GPS (region-dependant). Furthermore, the P1 is delivered with a USB cable, charger, a 512 MB MemoryStick Micro card, an extra stylus pen, earphones, software CD and the usual load of manuals.
An unboxing video can be found below (please note that quite a few of the bundled accessories are missing!).
Smart phone 2.0
Some might say that the P990 was a smart phone back in 2005 when announced, but it didn’t look any smart. Sony Ericsson has fixed this ‘problem’ with the P1 – not only is it a smart phone, it also looks smart.
Unlike the other members of the P-series, the P1 doesn’t feature the traditional flip design. Instead, it’s most comparable to the casual candy bar design with the keypad (well, keyboard) and display sharing the room on the front. P1 measures 106 x 55 x 17 millimetres, and weighs in at only 124 grams. This is significantly less than P990 (and other P-series members for that matter), and what a great improvement that is! It’s looking smashingly beautiful and extremely well built in its black / metal colour variant, called Silver Black.
The front of P1 is partly made of hard plastic and partly made of brushed metal. It’s a nice combination of materials, and the colours compliment each other. The keyboard is made of soft plastic and feels really good to use. Admittedly, it’s strange to use to begin with, but once the first hour has passed, it’ll be joyful sailing. It’s fairly good to hold in hand, and one hand use isn’t impossible.
The backside is rubberised, which gives a really nice feel. It feels like a quality handset, and makes the phone less slippery. Other than that there is a metallic plastic piece around the speaker, which I personally could have been without. It somewhat ruins the design of the backside – in my opinion, at least. The black / silver colour scheme from the front suits the backside well.
The left side houses a back key, the jog dial and a strap holder. The stylus pen is also located near the the top of the phone on the left side. Right side holds the camera shutter key, the MemoryStick Micro (M2) card slot and a short cut key for internet.
The Fast Port connector and microphone is located at the bottom of the phone, and the power button as well as infrared communication port is located at the top.
The P1 came with a BST-40 battery at 1120 mAh. According to official measurements, this gives up to 440 hours of standby time or up to 10 hours of calls, which is very good! I have not experienced any problems with the battery, and am very impressed by how it works on a daily basis. It was necessary to charge the phone every third day. The SIM card is located below the battery, and you’ll have to remove the battery to get to the SIM card.
The essence of multitasking
The operating system in P1 is the open Symbian OS 9.1 with the UIQ 3.0 user interface. P1 has 128 megabytes of RAM memory, where about 80 megabytes are free on a fresh boot. This is enough for most people, and makes it possible to have about 40 – 50 applications running at the same time. The processor is an ARM9-based one with a CPU clock frequency at 208 MHz. The P1 boots in about 40 seconds, which is a remarkable improvement compared to other UIQ 3 phones.
The version of UIQ 3 in P1 has been revamped compared to the one in P990. This means that you now have a fully customizable standby screen with up to 15 function / application short cuts. You’ll also have the ability to check emails, calendar posts, your text message inbox, missed calls and tasks directly on your standby screen. This works very nicely, and is quite useful.
The UIQ menu system is quite easy to get used to. Most of the time, you have several possible ways to perform actions. I’ll give you an example – if you’re in the main menu, and would like to enter the Messaging application, you can either use the jog dial on the left side to browse to the desired menu spot and then press the jog dial or the soft keys on the bottom of the display. Another method would be to simply press the application icon.
You can set up the menu layout either by grid or list view. Personally I prefer the grid view as I think it gives a better graphical overview of applications. You can personalize the look by adding more application short cuts to the various elements of the menu, change the name of the folders and so on.
In just about every application you can access help dialogues with regards to whatever application you’re running. It’s smart and is one of the features I like the most about UIQ – the help dialogues are all over the phone!
The built-in task manager is the best in all Symbian offerings. It gives quick access to the main menu and standby, displays the recent opened applications and offers management of running applications so you can quickly switch between applications. You can end applications one at a time or close all at once.
P1 has proved to be a stable smart phone. I have not experienced a single reboot within the testing period of about 1½ months.
Business on the move
Being that P1 is a smart phone based on the Symbian operating system the owner is able to install third party applications to expand the usability of the phone. There are about 220 – 250 applications and games for the UIQ 3 platform and this is quite rapidly increasing. While this amount might not be as large as the amount of applications in the S60 universe there are enough applications for me.
P1 comes with a bunch of office applications for various actions like reading and editing office documents, PDF files and scanning business cards. Furthermore, my review model was delivered with lots of freeware and test & buy applications pre-installed; one of them being Exchange ActiveSync for effective and easy management of push emails on your phone.
QuickOffice 3.6 is the default document viewer on the P1 and is capable of opening Excel, PowerPoint and Word files. Excel and Word files can also be edited and created with a fair amount of features and formatting options. Unfortunately, QuickOffice is a bit slow when dealing with large files, and if you really need this phone for use with documents and to put the QWERTY keyboard to the test, I’d recommend the Documents To Go application with more options, better compatibility with documents and it’s a lot faster.
Tasks can easily be added and can be quite comprehensive. By pressing the dates of start and due, a small calender will pop up on the display and you’ll have a very easy way to select your dates.
The business card scanner application works excellently! I’ve tested it several times and it hit the spot every single time. All details are included and it’s amazing how accurate it is. If it gets a misread for a contact field don’t worry – it also includes all the scanned text as a note attached to the newly created contact. Very smart.
The UIQ graphical user interface comes with a set of generic applications such as the notes application, calendar and file manager. Notes can be added in pure text with a few formatting abilities and also as drawn notes in different colours and pen sizes.
The calendar application works brilliantly and you can do just about anything you’d want with it.
The file manager works very well, and is capable of doing all simple actions and a few more advanced ones. However, if you want access to hidden drives and files, you’ll need another file manager like X-plore from Lonely Cat Games.
Other applications like calculator, converter, stop watch, alarms, clocks and connections management are to be found in the Tools menu.
There are lots of applications I can recommend having a closer look at, but especially CellPhoneSoft’s applications are great. Most of them are very useful and can be used for optimizing the performance of the phone or get a greater management of various stuff and operations running on the phone.
Control panel is to be found in the main menu now. I don’t know why Sony Ericsson has decided to move it from the Tools folder, but it’s easy to get to. You can change lots of settings here, so if you’re a tweaker you should have a closer look there as one of the first things.
Decent camera
The camera in P1 is a CMOS sensor camera with a resolution of 3.2 mega pixels. It offers an LED flash, auto focus and a set of nice camera features.
The user interface in the camera application is decent and fairly easy to use. Sure, it does require some ‘getting-used-to’ but it’s really not bad at all. The interface is not optimized for finger use, but personally I don’t have any problems with using my finghers only in the camera application. The jog dial can also be used to perform various operations like zoom and scrolling through the menus. A few keyboard keys double as short cut keys in the camera application and act as short cuts to various actions like focus settings and LED light.
The following settings are available in the camera application;
- Shoot mode – Video, Frame, Burst & Photo
- Frame size – 3 MP, 2 MP, 1 MP & VGA
- Auto focus – Normal, Macro & Off
- White balance – Cloudy, Daylight, Fluorescent, Incandescent & Auto
- Light – On & Off
- Effects – Black & White, Sepia, Solarization, Negative & Off
- Quality – Fine, Normal & Economy
- Night mode – On & Off
- Save to – Memory stick preferred, Memory stick & Phone memory
- Auto review – Off & On
- Shutter sound – Shutter sound 1, 2, 3, 4 & Off
- Self-timer – On & Off
- Reset file number – Reset now
Below you can find some sample photos shot with the P1.
As you can see by these photos, the P1 isn’t a bad camera phone. Photos come out pretty usable for most (prints & use on phone / computer). The photos are generally a bit noisy, and while some might not like this with the P1, it does also mean that the photos will not suffer from detail loss due to noise reduction or software photo detail sharpening.
The latest firmware update for the P1 really made some serious improvements on the camera. It introduces a focus square, so you know where you focus when taking photos. Also, it made the camera application and live camera preview a lot faster. The shutter lag is almost gone now and everything works as it was supposed to do.
Once you’re done with taking pictures, you can view and edit them in the picture gallery application.
Videos can be recorded in 3GP format in up to QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels) at 15 frames per second – 30 frames per second with lower resolutions. Video quality isn’t excellent but it’s possible to see what’s going on in the video. The LED flash and many settings can be used in video mode. You can check out video samples below (right click and save as…).
It does music
While P1 is not marketed as a music phone, I’d like to do just a short piece on it as a music player as well – every business man could make good use of a decent music player and FM radio when he’s on the move.
Music files are sorted by artists & albums. You can create own play lists if you’d like to have your music listed by genre and alike. The music player is nicely set up but a bit too conservative for my taste (but what the heck, it’s a business phone!). You can set equalizers for songs and perform various normal actions such as repeat and shuffle in songs.
The FM radio works brilliantly and supports RDS with an automatic channel storing feature for up to 20 channels / frequencies. You can use the TrackID service on the P1 for getting information about songs in the radio. It works by recording a short sample of the music in the radio, uploads it to Gracenote’s huge database and gets an answer a few seconds later with full information about the song, including artist, album and a buy link.
Handles the web like a pro
P1 is definitely an Internet smart phone which is why it’s sad to see that HSDPA is lacking in this device. UMTS (3G) is the fastest Internet solution available – besides WLAN 802.11b standard – and this gives about 300 – 400 Kbps. This is a shame as a nice broadband connection would suit this metallic phone very nicely.
Other than UMTS and WLAN, the P1 also supports Bluetooth 2.0 without EDR and Infrared data transmissions. It supports USB 2.0 so data transfers are really quick!
Opera is a well known web browser developer and is also the creator of the default web browser in P1 – Opera Mobile 8.65. This browser is capable of showing both mobile fitted websites as well as fully HTML formatted websites. You can choose whether or not to automatically fit the website to the phone display. You can also choose either portrait or landscape mode.
With Opera Mobile 8.65 you can perform tabbed browsing with up to 4 different tabs, which means you can efficiently browse through many web pages at once. It’s possible to save websites for off-line use.
Downloads are generally quite speedy and is nothing like on earlier UIQ 3 offerings where download speeds were amazingly low even on super-speedy WLAN connections.
While there are many good things about this browser, it does also have some cons. There is no proper Flash support and the Java support isn’t excellent either.
As on the W960, the RSS reader application in P1 is excellent and enables you to read your favourite content (like this blog’s posts) on your mobile phone for a much lower price than it would be to read posts in your mobile web browser. While all feeds can be managed and added in the application, there is an even easier way to add feeds. Simply go to the website you want to describe to with the default web browser, press the RSS icon on the top of the display and the RSS feed has been added. I said it in the W960, and I’ll do it again – this is damn clever!
P1 handles email messages very well. I’ve used the built-in on-line email set-up guide to set up my Gmail account on the P1. It went along very easily, and I have experienced that P1 is fast even with 800 email messages in the inbox. You can set it to download headers only or full content of the email messages, including attachments. Document attachments can be opened. Any sort of attachment can be sent in an email from the phone.
P1 supports both IMAP4 and POP3 when dealing with emails. It also offers encryption (SSL or TLS) and push emailing with a user-set time interval of checking for emails.
Phone book is brilliant!
P1 has got memory for up to 2,000 contacts, all with full details and several telephone numbers, fax number, email addresses and so on. Like with most other Sony Ericsson (smart) phones, you can store loads of informations about each contact. I’m not going to spend time listing all these, but trust me – there are lots of things for you to fill out! 
While the phone book is really good, I do not like the search feature. On feature phones like K850 and W910 you have a feature called Smart Search which makes the contacts search so much better and easier to use. It’s too bad this isn’t included in P1.
Full keyboard for messaging
The handset supports MMS and SMS messaging. There’s a limit of 100 kilobytes when creating MMS messages, and a limit of about 10 SMS text’s length when creating SMS messages. It’s very unlikely that some will use more characters than this when writing these small messages.
P1 handles messages quite well and I have yet not found any limits on how many messages it can store.
Text messages can be created with smilies, animations, mono coloured bitmaps, sound effects and different kinds of formatting. This is by far the best EMS implementation ever on a smart phone (this goes for all UIQ 3.0 devices). Texting can be done either by using the full keyboard, the on-screen keyboard or by using handwriting recognition. If you decide to use the keyboard which is obviously the easiest and fastest solution, you might need to give yourself a few minutes to get to know the somewhat strange layout of the keyboard. Once you’ve got the hang of it, you’ll never stop typing!
Calls
Regular calls and 3G video calls can be performed on the P1, and both are working brilliantly.
Regular 2G calls are very clear and loud, and I was very surprised by how great it sounded when talking with the wind blowing in your ears.
3G video calls are – as expected – a bit pixelated and sound quality isn’t perfect, but this is because of the 3G technology and its upload limits.
Network reception was generally good on the P1, however not perfect.
You can manage your calls on the phone and set the various call settings like speed dialling. The call list can hold the last 30 in and outgoing calls (in total).
Summing it up
Sony Ericsson P1 is a good enterprise targeted smart phone. Its operating system is rock solid and you have the ability to install lots of applications and games on it. With 128 megabytes of RAM memory you are able to perform some serious multitasking.
Calls are excellent on P1. The sound quality is very good and the loud speaker is loud enough for you to hear incoming calls. The built-in vibrator is strong enough for most people to feel it in their pocket.
The 1120 mAh battery is excellent and gives a good battery life on the P1. On a full charge it’s capable of staying alive for about 2-3 days at full blast use.
The price of P1 is more than acceptable. In Denmark, the P1 costs about £300, which isn’t bad at all. Depending on region, it’s also bundled with a Bluetooth GPS worth about 50 pounds. What’s funny is that P990 is priced higher than P1 in Denmark – this leaves absolutely no reason for not getting the P1 instead of P990.
P1 is a business smart phone and not targeted at young people who needs to text, call and play games. It’s for business people who needs a good companion with WLAN, a QWERTY keyboard, e-mails and excellent documents managing.
[Review based on firmware revision R6F41 & R6G04]
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