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Sony Ericsson P800 Reviewed (Again)
Big Mike writes "c|net just published their review of the Sony Ericsson P800. They deem it the 'Maserati of smart phones'. Built- in camera, speakerphone, 16MB Memory Stick Duo, Bluetooth and IR connectivity, wireless e-mail, MP3 audio and MPEG-4 video capable, and more. Sounds good to me..." Of course, it looks pretty slick too. Infosync looked at this phone last month, and more praise is heaped on this time around too.
i just got one and there are some quite good features. the best are Opera which can make pretty much any web page readable, next there is putty for ssh, and also there is a dev kit and no problem running your apps. battery life is not so good if you have the backlight on a lot.
but posting to slashdot while sitting on the toilet or googling from the bus (over GPRS) are good features...
The p800 is pretty expensive here in the UK. I had a look the other week and it was about £280. I am with Orange and despite spending about $45/£30 a month on my phone they won't give me any discount on it at all. The phone companies need to wise up and discount these new handsets, otherwise people like me are going to stick to normal phone calls and texts and the phone companies won't be able to make any money from picture messages or data calls and those hugely expensive 3G licenses will have gone to waste!
In my opinion there are just as cool and wonderful phones offered by Ericsson's rivals Nokia, Siemens and Motorola (at least here in Europe). Yet Slashdot keeps posting this adulation crap about a single phone from Ericsson. Nokia, for example, released something like 12 new phones a week or two ago. Where's the story about those?
At least make a section for the P800 so I can block it from the front page.
Nokia 9210:
+Word & Excel Document Editing
+Fax capable
+Memory Cards available upto 256Mb and beyond
-Size
-Slow, can't run mp3's properly
-Limited Memory to run apps in
-No GPRS support
-No Bluetooth
P800:
+Size vs. functional display size
+Touchscreen & excellent HWR (even reads my scrawl!)
+Opera with Small Screen Rendering (This is FANTASTIC!)
+Excellent inbuilt speaker, mp3's sound good
+FAST!
+Better video support (mp4)
+GPRS
+Bluetooth
-No Word or Excel editing - can only view (and then some fonts are not supported)
-No fax!
-Sony (gosh-darn-em) Memory Stick DUO... currently only 64Mb sticks (128mb soon it seems) but EXPENSIVE! Plus specs states 256Mb MAX!
-Sync with Outlook misses a lot of features (anniversaries and birthdays not supported!)
Spoke to the SE people this weekend at CEBIT:
* Word, Excel or PPT editing is a "3rd party opportunity" (read - in the pipeline)
* Same with video recording, which makes sense, given the MPEG4 licencing issues
* Fax software also 3rd party, and within a few months, as well as several GPS mapping solutions.
Also, there's a beta running around out there of new software for the P800 that addresses many of the sync/mail/addressbook issues (full SyncML compatibility) due in April.
For anyone AT CeBIT with a P800, go directly to the service desk at the back and haev them flash your phone with the latest patches. They're doing 4 phones at a time, all day long, so it can take 20-30 minutes to upgrade but the camera performance is every bit as good as the Nokia now. MUCH better low-light quality and hardly any running (it IS CMOS, of course)