This one's a keeper! (Sony Ericsson P910i)

Member Name: reddragonflame

Product:	Sony Ericsson P910i
Date:	15/11/05 (878 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very good phone with many features

Disadvantages: A bit pricey...

I have now lost count of how many phones I have had. After my poor, poor T630 had a nasty sand incident, which was then worsened by some reddragonflame repair work-gone-wrong, I decided maybe I should take my business to another phone. I was coming up to 18, so I thought, hmm, I think it'd be good to get a contract.

Being the clever bugger that I am I figured that getting an O2 contract phone would mean that when the contract expired and I got to keep the phone, I would be able to use my O2 genie sim card if I didn't enjoy the contract. So, with this in mind I trotted off to the O2 store in my local city centre.

After once more having to fight my way past harassed shoppers, scary two-foot tall toddler treading on my toes, elderly people driving bizzarely fast on little OAP scooter things, and (slightly worryingly) a selection of absolutely mahoosive birds, including a vulture, I finally got off the bus.

Now, I have been thinking of getting a PDA for a while, because frankly they look cool. I have loads of pictures, videos, music etc. on my PC and would love to carry them with me. So when I saw a phone and a PDA together in one slightly-bulky-but-oh-so-sweet looking package I nearly dribbled with anticipation. The only problem with it was a hefty price tag of £80 pounds followed by £34 a month for the next year. Bearing in mind that this came with a helluva lot of texts and minutes, I just decided to get it. So after wiping my chin, I went to the counter and bought it.

First impressions were mixed. As with most bulky phones it looked good, but never the less was a bulky phone. It had a funky style flip which, when up, made the phone look like a traditional mobile and when down revealed a small QWERTY keypad (which, for those who like me didn't understand this, means that the first six letters are, similar to a real keyboard, QWERTY) allowing easy typing or texting. The screen also goes from a small window-style view onto a large, clear touchscreen which takes up a good 5/6's of the phones face. This also allows for widescreen viewing of videos or full sized viewing for photos. The phone itself is a nice gentle shade of silver, and when the flip is removed (more on that later) is considerably smaller and lighter, as well as looking far cooler with a touchscreen keypad.

Oops, I seem to be jumping ahead of myself a bit here. Before I carry on raving about how good the phone is, what say I get back to basics and tell you what come in the box with it? Well, as well as the phone and battery and charger there are also a load of O2 leaflets and an instruction manual that is nearly as thick as the holy bible. There are also two stylus' (I don't really know the plural) which are basically pens that you use on the touch screen. There is a carry case and a screwdriver for converting the phone into a PDA style device, and a memory card (32mb) to add to the already pretty chunky 62mb phone memory. On top of all this, just to really add to the wow factor, it contains not one, but TWO CD roms and all of the necessary equipment to hook your phone to the PC and download or upload music, videos, photos, whatever you want. Whew.

After plugging in to charge, I noticed the first problem of any sort of significance.... it does have a habit of coming loose from the charger. This means that if, for example you have pets, you have to keep it out of reach and check it occasionally to make sure it hasn't been shaken out of its socket. It charges quickly though, although you can't lock the keypad.

When the phone is switched on it makes a strange gurgling noise which I assume is a reference to the wierd bubble fetish that O2 has in its adverts. The first time it is switched on you have to do various tasks such as setting the time and date, and "calibrating the screen", which takes a suprising amount of man minutes. The easiest thing to do is set it to factory, because seriously, the slightest judder results in a messed up navigation setting and therefore a lot of hassle to correct.

From here there is enough to do to keep anybody happy. As well as programs such as quickpoint, quicksheet and quickword which are effectively Microsoft Powerpoint, Excel and Word respectively there is also a video player (with widescreen!), music player and picture viewer complete with zoom. The games aren't as varied.... there are only two. Chess, which is stupidly hard to the point where you swear the computer cheats, and Solitaire which is fantastically addictive and fun. As far as I have found, there are no games available to download anywhere, so it gets a slight thumbs down here.

The programs are easy to use, and work just like their microsoft predecessors. For example, with quicksheet you are able to use long and complex strings of sums and codes to create large spreadsheets, and with quickpoint you can view Powerpoint presentations set up on a computer. Quickword I personally found a bit pointless, since there is a notepad known as "jotter" which allows not only word documents to be written and edited, but also pictures to be drawn and it is only marginally harder to use.

Text input is an interesting feature on this phone. Not only is there a keypad like any other phone and the QWERTY keyboard, there is also an impressive handwriting recognition input mode. Although it is very strict when it comes to the exact shape the letters have to be, you eventually get the hang of it and it proves to be very fast when it comes to writing texts.

For media, as I mentioned previously, there is a video player and a picture viewer as well as a music player. The video quality is decent with the widescreen mode, and the recording quality is the best I have seen. The pictures look equally stunning, with no apparant resolution limit for viewing. However, the camera quality is slightly dissapointing. I found it the best of all my old phones, but considering some new phones have 1.3 megapixel cameras for a lower cost it is still an annoyance. Nevertheless, 640x480 looks good on phone and computer alike, and when zoomed in on the phone it looks fantastic. Music quality is ok, nothing to get overly excited about but not bad either. The preset ringtones are imaginative and funny - having some random woman singing "Ring Ring Ring" just never grows old!

The phone really comes into its own, however, when hooked up to a PC. Allowing the transfer of your own MP4 movies and MP3 tracks, on top of transferring JPGs back and forth, the software is easy to use and the connection looks impressive with a seperate stand to keep the phone steady. Transfer is very very slow, slower than any other device I have seen, with the average song taking a whole 10 minutes (!) to transfer completely. There are also a few more programs that can be downloaded from the web, such as more image editors, and even a SAT-NAV program. The phones memory is also boostable by memory cards, and it supports up to 1 gigagbyte! Since each card is very basic slot in and out without any annoying installation, it means that you can have as much music and stuff as you want.

Connecting to other phones also has a lot of options. Infrared and bluetooth are fast and easy to use, with a decent bluetooth coverage of ten metres all around you. Infrared presents the same problems as it always has, so you will rely on bluetooth a lot more. Transfer times are quicker than most phones and received files are easy to save.

The phone is at its best when you take off the keypad. Complete with spare screws and screwdriver, it is an easy task to do and improves the aesthetics and performance massively. There is a mode which allows a touch screen keypad, which acts as the usual keypad just more.... well, funkily. It does mean the screen gets dirty faster, but it is easy enough to clean.

Customisation is great. With ringtones you have the choice of monophonic, polyphonic, and truetone (MP3 ringtones) which means you can use your fave song as a tone or alarm. You can also switch about the icons in the menus and lists depending on which you prefer, and select different colours and "themes". For wallpapers you have two options; flip up and flip out. This I found to be very cool, and certainly earns a bit of wow for the phones coolness.

So, to wrap up this fairly massive description, I think it is fair enough to say that this is a decent phone. If you have a lot of money or want an impressive phone to wow your friends with, then this is it. But remember that contract phones are just that - a contract. Don't get yourself into debt for one of these. Check my other reviews for cheaper options.

Things to look out for
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While on the web, if you can I reccomend downloading ImToo mpeg encoder. It lets you convert movies into mp4 which means you can play them on your phone! Also, image searches are good for finding pics of your favorite celebrities to upload! Look out for links as soon as I find them.

Summary: Get it if you have the cash

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