I had a SE P910i which would still be the perfect phone if it had 3g, WiFi, a faster processor and could take larger capacity memory cards. I thought my P990i would be such a phone but sadly, it just crashes when you ask it to do more than make a phone call, send a text, wake you up ... yet it will do some taxing jobs with no problem.

It will make video phone calls easily and well but surfing the internet either with the built in browser or Opera Mini just results in crashes which makes all the communications options pointless. It has WiFi, bluetooth, 3G, infrared etc. and, as yet, I still can't bring myself to sell this phone on so it must have some charm I fail to see now. The screen's good and clear. It's pretty tough, with a few batteries you can work on spreadsheets and documents on it's inbuilt office suite happily. I'd hoped I could make Skype calls using some IM+ Skype software I'd bought and it's 3g capabilities on the 3 mobile network but configuring the phone for it proved too time consuming.

It doesn't matter how you get data in the phone if it crashes anyway. If you have software based on .sis files which worked on your P910i, it's unlikely to work on the P990i so that aspect of the upgrade path becomes negative as well.

Having said all of this, it seems the phone is so well endowed with hardware it is developing a cult following for people writing their own software modules for it and modifying the phones. It reflects very badly on Sony Ericsson this thing made it into production at all.

I bought two extra batteries for this phone when I got it so on very long journeys, I still wrangle with it when batteries for other phones have died.

One thing it does well is act as a 3g modem. Connect it to your PC's USB port using a cable and you can get data into your PC fast and reliable way. In many respects this is a better option since if you're on a bus or a train, having a ball of blu tac with you to stick the phone to the window will get you a better signal than using a USB mobile broadband "dongle"