Sony Ericsson P1i

Sony Ericsson's P-series of business phones have long been popular in many parts of the world, though not particularly so in North America. The devices have always combined some of the best modern day technology that was available into a device that, while big, was still no larger than a typical PDA. The P1, Sony Ericsson's new flagship workhorse, is the first P-series device to cram all of that raw capability into a form factor that is only slightly larger than a typical candy bar phone.

Physical Aspects

Even though it carries a 'P' designation, the new Sony Ericsson P1 shares far more of its physical design with the Sony Ericsson M600 than it does with other P-series devices like the P990. In general, the P1 can be thought of as an M600 that was given an improved keyboard, WiFi, and an auto-focus camera on the back. Indeed, the P1's 106mm x 55mm x 17mm (4.1" x 2.2" x .7") dimensions and 129g (4.5oz) weight make it a very pocketable device in spite of its capabilities.

The front of the P1 consists solely of the 2.6" TFT display and the QWERTY keyboard. The display is reasonably bright and crisp, but seems to lack some of the visual pop that I've seen on many other recent QVGA (240x320 pixel) displays. The surface of the display sits a few millimeters below the face of the phone, as is the case with 95% of the touchscreen devices on the market today. This makes it more difficult to clean than devices such as the HTC Touch and Sony Ericsson's own W960, which use flush mounted displays. This sunken nature of the display is all the more obvious to users because of the P1's lack of hardware softkeys. Instead, the P1's Symbian OS and UIQ 3 user interface rely solely on on-screen softkeys along the bottom of the display. Other on-screen controls are mostly intended to be accessed via the scroll wheel or the included stylus The stylus itself is very thin, which some people dislike. It is, however, a respectable 95mm (3.75") in length.

The QWERTY keyboard on the P1 is unusual in that the right and left edge of each convex shaped key serves a different purpose. As such, the 'A' and 'S' letters are on the same key instead of on neighboring keys. The shift key located in the bottom left corner of the keypad works as one would expect, and the ALT key, in the lower right hand corner of the keypad, is used for accessing the numeric keypad digits and symbols. A pair of arrow keys straddle the space bar, and they offer a bit of help when navigating the P1 without using the stylus. The number keys, when used with the ALT key (which can be locked on), work like they do on regular phones in that you don't have to worry about the edges, you just press the key. The design is compact, but far from ideal. A year ago when I reviewed the M600, I adapted to its keyboard and learned to live with it. But now, after having been spoiled by many devices with fine QWERTY keyboards, I am less inclined to embrace it. Those extra few millimeters of width offered by the keyboards on devices like the Motorola Q or Palm Treos make a big difference. The P1's keyboard is certainly passable for those that value a compact form factor over ease, and speed, of use - but it is not one that I am in love with. In any event, the keyboard is faster and easier to use than the touchscreen based virtual keyboard or handwriting recognition system.


While the P1's aforementioned scroll-wheel is a fine example of how to build a scroll-wheel, I still lament the lack of a joystick or d-pad on the P1 (as I did with the M600). Just as the 4-way navigation on the BlackBerry Pearl allowed me to finally appreciate the BlackBerry UI, the lack of such a 4-way directional control on the P1 makes me resent having to scroll so much when making edits to a message or simply navigating a grid of menu icons. It slows me down too much, though not as much as whipping out a stylus would. Located directly below the scroll-wheel on the left edge of the P1 is a dedicated back button, a button that will be used very often by any P1 owner. A user configurable application key that defaults to the message inbox is located on the right edge of the P1, above the Memory Stick Micro card slot and the camera shutter button.

The power key is located on the top of the device, near the stylus silo. I like how the P1 vibrates briefly when it powers up, letting the user know that they can release the key. A fast port connector and a message/charging status LED are located on the bottom of the P1. The fast port is used for charging (with or without the included dock), attaching headsets, and for USB connections. The fact that the P1 can charge via USB is nice, but the fact that one must use a special fast port to USB cable reduces the benefits of USB charging a bit. A standard mini-USB or micro-USB connector would have suited me far better. The primary 3.2 megapixel camera is located on the back of the P1. While there is a protective glass window over the camera's lens, there is no plastic shutter to protect the glass from being scratched. It is recessed a bit, though, which probably offers adequate protection. A low-resolution, secondary camera for video calls is located on the front of the device, above the display.

In terms of build quality, the P1 is rock solid. It feels like it would be able to survive some moderate abuse, and I am pleased with the choice of finishes on the device in general. The P1 stays reasonably clean looking, even after a lot of use. The display, as I mentioned before, can be hard to clean (dust gathers in the corners), but otherwise I have no complaints. The P1's design is very subdued and tasteful, it is just that some real practical compromises have been made in order to keep the form factor so compact.

Core Functions

While the Sony Ericsson P1's jittery signal strength gauge might suggest otherwise, the P1 seems to do a pretty fine job of holding onto a weak GSM signal. In particularly bad signal areas I experienced some breaking up of the audio, but the P1 didn't drop any calls while in the US or Europe, and it never stated that I couldn't make a GPRS data connection when I tried to pick up email or browse the web. When the signal was reasonable, the audio quality of calls on the P1 followed suit. The speakerphone function performed decently as long as the P1 user spoke clearly and with a fair amount of volume. Our P1 managed almost exactly 8 hours of talk time in our test on T-Mobile's 1900MHz GSM network (the P1 also supports the 900 and 1800MHz GSM bands, as well as UMTS on 2100MHz). Sony Ericsson rates the P1 as being capable of over 2 weeks of standby time, which I find to be optimistic. But with that said, the P1 will sit quietly and wait for a call for a very, very long time before the battery is fully drained. As long as there are no active data connections due to push email or similar applications.
The contacts system on the P1 is adequate. It stores vast amounts of information about a contact in a well organized manner by making good use of tabs. From the contact screen it is very convenient to send a message or to place a call. My gripe with the system as a whole has to do with the searching mechanism. There is no quick search function from the standby screen or even from the phone application. Searches can only be initiated from inside the contacts app, and even then searches can only be made against the first or the last name of a contact, depending on how the device is configured. I find this to be wholly inadequate.

The P1 has no real profiles system, but simply an option to put the phone into silent mode. Silent mode can be quickly toggled on the standby screen by long-pressing the # key on the keyboard or by accessing the function from the More menu. The various ringtones for things such as calls, email, or text messages can all be individually configured. The vibration alarm can be configured for each different alert type as well, being on all the time, on only when the phone is in silent mode, or off completely. In spite of how I set the device, though, inbound Exchange Activesync emails always caused an alert tone to be triggered, even though email alerts were set to vibrate only.

Voice dialing on the P1 seems to only be accessible when the device is used with a headset of some sort. The P1 uses an old fashioned voice tag based voice dialing system that requires a voice tag to be recorded for each number (not contact) that the user wishes to access. I was unable to record a voice tag with a Bluetooth headset (it failed to hear anything), but I was able to use the headset once the tags has been recorded. A better option for many might be the P1's speed contacts application, which can be assigned to one of the shortcut positions at the bottom of the standby screen. Those positions can also be set directly as a contact, bypassing the speed contacts application completely.

A device such as the P1 should really excel when it comes to messaging, but my experience has been less than satisfactory. While the P1 has built-in support for Exchange ActiveSync for over the air synchronization of contacts, appointments, and email, the included RoadSync software that handles the task did not perform well. 3 times in the past week the application silently disabled the Direct Push connection due to some sort of connection error. Only when the user loads the app will they see a message noting this, meaning that you could go for hours thinking that you simply received no email. On top of that, it doesn't support folders or include support for peak vs. off-peak times. As such, Direct Push is either on all the time, wasting battery power while you sleep, or it is off.

The P1 performed hardly better with my IMAP email account. The application was very, very slow and unresponsive at times (perhaps owing to the number of messages in my inbox), and both the IMAP account and the ActiveSync account showed up in the Messaging application as if they had no inbox. The outbox, drafts, and sent folders were accessible, but not the inbox. The inboxes could only be accessed by selecting the mailbox from the standby screen's Today! widget. The regular SMS/MMS inbox didn't have that problem, and showed up as expected. Instead, the SMS/MMS inbox failed on any attempt to delete a message, offering me nothing more than a "bad request" message in a popup window. The P1 also has support for RIM's BlackBerry Connect push system, but I did not have the opportunity to test it.

The tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900MHz) and UMTS 2100MHz P1 supports only slow GPRS data on GSM networks and basic WCDMA data rates on European 3G networks. The P1 lacks the faster EDGE and HSDPA data rates that many networks are capable of. We didn't test the UMTS data rates of the P1, but the GPRS connection on T-Mobile USA's network averaged about 37Kbps. The P1's WiFi support was, of course, faster, coming in at about 191Kbps. For comparison, the HTC Mogul for Sprint managed 1260Kbps speeds over WiFi, roughly 6 times faster than those of the P1. On top of that, I found the P1's data system to be particularly complicated to configure and manage. The system requires different options and tasks to be accomplished in many different applets, including the WiFi app, the Connection manager, and the Internet accounts screen. At least it supports connection grouping, so that the P1 can be setup to look for your home WiFi account before accessing the GPRS network. The thing is, I ran into many problems with WiFi on the P1 that, so far, Sony Ericsson's engineers have been unable to explain. My WEP secured home network could only be used when the P1's WiFi system had the power-saving mode disabled, and the WPA secured network at the house in Ireland where I was vacationing could not be used at all. I had no problems with public, unsecured networks, though. Bluetooth and USB connectivity gave me no troubles on the P1.

Multimedia / Applications

As has long been the case with Sony Ericsson's P-series of devices, the P1 has a reasonable suite of supported multimedia functions. The auto-focus, 3.2 megapixel camera is a good start. The camera takes pretty reasonable photos in general, has a strong flash, and has a user interface that is pretty intuitive. The auto-focus system is a bit hard to control at times, though, and your intended subject is not always in focus. This problem is due, at least in part, to the fact that there is no focus target in the viewfinder screen. Users merely compose the photo, press the shutter button in half way, and the P1 reports that focus has been locked - without showing you what it has locked focus on. The white balance system in the camera is also a bit out of sync with the real world. Most of the time the photos come out well enough, but the camera tends to always be at least a bit off, even with the manual settings. It is still overall a reasonable camera, it just isn't as good as we have come to expect from Sony Ericsson. It does record nice quality QVGA resolution video clips, though, and an included video player application can play streaming videos in many formats, including Real and H.263 and H.264.

The P1 fared somewhat better when it came to music playback. While the P1 ships with Sony Ericsson's Disc2Phone music software for personal computers, I simply used Microsoft's Windows Media Player to sync over a few albums worth of music. The phone organizes the music by artist, album, song, and playlists automatically. While I felt that the P1 lacked maximum volume when used with my Bluetooth A2DP stereo Motorola S9 headphones, the P1's MegaBass equalizer setting performed well, compensating for the S9's generally weak bass response. When the music player is running, it can be quickly accessed by clicking on the current track name that is listed on the P1's standby screen. The P1 doesn't provide as rich of a music experience as Sony Ericsson's Walkman branded handsets, but it performs quite well in general. It could certainly do with a regular 3.5mm stereo headphone jack, too. The somewhat related Sound Recorder application allows users to record voice memos, as expected, but also serves double duty as a song identifier, using the Track ID service that is found on many other Sony Ericsson handsets.

The P1 uses the popular Opera v8.65 browser for web tasks. I found the browser to work well for most mobile web tasks, though I don't find it to be nearly as capable as the Safari based browsers offered by Apple and Nokia. The browser supports use in both landscape and portrait modes, and also offers a useful zoom setting that let's users scale pages to the size that suits them best. I also like that the screen can be scrolled with a stylus or finger dragging motion instead of forcing the use of the scroll bar. I am not a fan, however, of the browser's menu organization, nor of the amount of screen real estate wasted by the UIQ controls at the top and bottom of the screen.

The P1, as a smartphone, has all of the expected personal information management type applications: calendar, task list, notes, calculator, and unit converter. The calendar app worked very well, but would have been easier to use if the keyboard's left and right arrow keys could be used to switch months and weeks in the current view. As is, a lot of scroll-wheel spinning is required to navigate if the user wants to avoid pulling out the stylus. The other applications also worked well, in general.

The included QuickOffice suite of apps lets the P1 user create and edit Microsoft Office compatible documents. Using them for real editing work requires the stylus since there is no joystick or d-pad that can be used for normal 4-way navigation. The P1 also includes the Pdf+ document viewer and a business card scanner. I was very impressed by the card scanner. It makes great use of the macro focusing abilities of the P1's camera. The OCR processing of the cards I tested was very, very accurate, and the information is automatically placed into a new contact record that the user can edit and save.

Other applications of note on the P1 include a solid RSS news feed reader, a file manager, an FM radio (requires use of the included wired headset), and a couple of games. All of these programs and data can be stored either in the P1's 159MB of available internal storage, or on the included 512MB Memory Stick Micro (M2) card. Sony Ericsson's PC Suite for Windows based computers is also included, and it allows users to move media files around and synchronize their P1 with programs such as Microsoft Outlook.