Sony Ericsson's P990 Smartphone Released

Dynamoo writes "After months of rumors, Sony Ericsson has finally announced their P990 Symbian smartphone. Packing both UMTS (3G) and WiFi in addition to a 2 megapixel digital camera and a host of other goodies, the P990 looks like it will be a shot in the arm for the Symbian camp. There's no indication of a US release for this handset, but the rest of the world can expect to see it early next year."

Comments

Sony, still sticking it to the consumers

[yagu]

from the article: Internal memory is 80Mb, and this is expandable through Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo cards (64Mb is included, 2Gb maximum).

'Nuff said.

Enough with the proprietary memory stick technology already!

I hate company's that use a stick to sell their product.

A memory carrot would be more to my liking. (Can you say SD, or MMC?)

Re:Sure, it looks nice, but...

[Roguelazer]

Hmm. I may have to call you out on several elements of that argument. Firstly:

A Conestoga Wagon transported about 8 (short) tons of cargo (according to the wikipedia article). According to howstuffworks.com, coal produces approximately 2,460 kWh/ton. Now, your average computer/monitor combination draws between 150W and 200W, according to some basic research. That could also be written as .2kWh. So in 24 hours, this device draws, um, 4.8 kWh. Considering that a Conestoga Wagon's worth of coal would be about 19,680 kWh of power, I think we can safely assume that a computer uses about 1/12 of a Conestoga Wagon full of coal PER YEAR.

What else? Um. The thought that lots of power is spent on optical mice is kind of funny. I haven't been able to find any concrete information, but since an optical mouse can run solely off the power provided by a PS/2 port, I'm going to assume that there's virtually no power usage involved.

Strangely enough, though, I do agree with you. For basic tasks (word processing, web browsing, etc), I've never seen anybody who needed more than about a 1GHz machine. That's fast enough to handle the flashy graphics and jazz. I've always found it funny to see Intel advertising their latest 3.9GHz dual-core hyper-threading machine as good for web browsing. But, having played Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, I can tell you quite authoritatively that you can never have too much power in your graphics card. ;)

Horrible keyboard design

[vrv1]

I have a p910a (and had a p800 before that) and one of the things that really stand out is the keyboard on the back of the keyflip. The keyflip can increase the size of the screen and become a PDA or when not used can become a cell phone (which is the most important use of the device). By doing away with that, there really is no reason to buy the p990 instead of the Palm 700 (other than that you are a rabid anti-u$ fanatic). You can argue that the P910a's design might result in higher strain on the hinges. But I found the hinges to be pretty sturdy and I always use my index fingers to support the body of the phone while I use the thumb to do the typing.

This is a step back for the P series and i hope SonyEricsson will change it.

Re:I want a DUMB phone

[MacGod]

Re: I want a super-simple phone.

You know, I used to think the same thing. All I wanted was a small, light, no-ringtones, no-camera, black-and-white-screen phone. But I just moved to the UK and bought a Samsung E350 slider phone. It has an MP3/AAC player, a camera, a colour screen, Java games and all that.

But you know what? It's small, the battery life is as good as any other phone I've ever owned (including black-and-white bare basics phones). It weighs next to nothing, the call quality is good, and I just don't use the games or any other extraneous features.

And wouldn't you know it? Within a day of getting the USb cable for the phone, I set my ringtone to an MP3 of the Star Wars theme song (from the Rebellion's medal ceremony at the end of A New Hope). And I took a goofy self-portrait for my wallpaper. Why not? It's fun, a little silly, but entertaining.

I think the "I just want a simple phone!" is at times overstated. What I really want is a phone that doesn't make too many compromises for extra features. I don't need video recording capabilities, but if it can add them without sacrificing size or battery life, I'm not too worried. And besides, I do like gadgets (and I can't imagine I'm alone in that regard, especially not on Slashdot), so why wouldn't I want my phone to be gadgety?

I think we geeks are just more sensitive to tradeoffs. There are a lot of phones that are heavy on features, but sacrifice basic useability to get there. The Microsoft Word of phones, if you will. But there also exist phones that are good compromises. Just don't use the features you don't need.