First week with Sony Ericsson P1
2007-07-18 08:00

Sony Ericsson makes a new attempt with a smart mobile phone. After a week with the P1, we can conclude that it is considerably faster than its predecessor. Combined with more and better features it feels promising.

Sony Ericssons new top model P1 has a touch screen and spiced up with both new software and other features like a camera and FM radio. After a week of testing, it feels promising.


The starting screen shows task from the calendar, missed calls and incoming messages. There is support for plugins on the start screen, for instance updated weather reports or stock prices. Below there are icons for the most common programs, and by clicking the arrow even more program icons pop up. The image to the right shows the main menu. The colours are customizable - here we had chosen the Amazonas theme.

The thing that is enjoyable with the P1 after having used it for a while (during vacations) is that it is not just only a useful smartphone. It has also been spiced with some entertainment features. A good camera, for instance. In principle, the images are just as good as those taken with the Sony Ericsson K800 and K810. However, the P1 only has a photo light, and not a real flash. So, indoors with poor lighting, the P1 is a weaker card. But still - the sharpness is really good, and the colour balance is also good. The specification says it has 3.2 megapixels and autofocus.

Another good thing is the image gallery function, where it is easy to browse images and to edit them, for instance by zooming in and changing the size of the image afterwards.


In the image gallery you can browse the images as thumbnails or in full-screen mode, as well as edit, sort and send the images. The P1 is not called a “Cybershot” as in the case of the camera mobile K810, but it still retains a lot of those features.

Music player, video player and FM radio are some of the features more focused on entertainment. We will only mention the RDS radio here, since the P1 actually beats its competitors here. It works really well and is filled with features. The reception is very good (via the handsfree antenna), it is easy to automatically set all the channels, and thanks to the RDS system, the naming of the channels is handled smoothly. Not least it is possible to allow news and local traffic information to interrupt the transmission, and the phone automatically selects the frequence with the strongest signal.


The RDS is one of the P1's strong features.


Some features from the Walkman phones have also been implemented. With the TrackID functionality, it is possible to make a recording from the radio or surrounding sounds, and send it to a database, and only seconds later get an answer back with the name of the song and the artist, as well as a direct link to the operator's online music shop.

The predecessors to the P1 from Sony Ericsson are the M600 and the P990. When they were introduced about a year ago, it was supposed to mean a revenge for the Sony Ericsson. In the beginning it looked good. The units felt feature-filled and well-made. But lately there has been an increasing flow of complaints about bugs and system sluggishness.

So the first question I think most people ask themselves is: how does the P1 feel? Fast and bug free? Yes, actually surprisingly fast and bug free. How can that be, when Sony Ericsson struggled a year with software updates to the P1 predecessors? Partly, the answer is exactly that. Tiny bugs in the system (UIQ 3.0) has been fixed during this year.

But most of all, it is something that Sony Ericsson does not want to mention itself. The P990 and M600 were probably equipped with way too little memory (64 Mbyte) to work well for all of us that want a lot of features and many programs running at the same time. With the P1, Sony Ericsson has doubled the working memory (RAM) to 128 megabyte. In addition, out of the 64 Mbyte memory in the P990, most of it was used by the system, so in practice, in the P1, the free working memory has probably not only doubled, but increased four times. The fact is that we during the past week have had about fifteen applications running simultaneously without any memory problems or sluggishness.


The Opera web browser can be opened in full-screen mode, or like this, in ordinary mode. As usual, the pages can be shown as they are on the web, or reformatted, to avoid the need to scroll sideways.

It has to be said, that it is a bit weak that Sony Ericsson does not have turbo 3G in the P1. Apart from that, both 3G and WLAN work pretty smoothly for me, so far. The browser from Opera is very nice, and the e-mail client from Sony Ericsson is also good, as usual.


It is possible to show the e-mail list in many many, and you can also get it on the standby screen.

Text input is done through the neat keyboard, where each button has two letters. A push on the left side gives one letter, a push on the right side another letter. It does not take that long a time to learn. Some letters common to many European languages do not have individual buttons, instead for such “special letters” you need to push several times, for instance on A to get an Ä.


Buttons with two letters each. The buttons in the middle also work as figures.

The keyboard is the same as in the old Sony Ericsson M600. But a new feature is that the P1 supports XT9, the new version of T9, where the system guesses which word I am about to write, so that I only have to confirm the guess, rather than to type the complete word.


Quickoffice handles Office documents.

Quickoffice is the application to work with Office documents. It works very well. No file conversion is necessary. Above all, it works fast thanks to the available working memory.

These are the first impressions of the P1, after a week of testing. There are more features, such as additional applications, the business card scanner and the video features.



Example image using the P1's camera.

Av: Linus Brohult, Jonas Kämpe