Tuesday, March 19, 2002
The new Sony-Ericsson smart phone P-800
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "HARDWARE" @ 05:07 PM
At CeBIT, I got a chance to play with the new Symbian based smart phone for about 20 minutes. This is a very very cool device. It is well below 6 ounces, though just a bit thick for a phone, but not too much. Certainly worth the tradeoff given what the device does. The screen is great, 320 X 208 I think, reflective and side-lit, like all of the Pocket PC 2002 devices. Overall it seem well constructed, though I think they purchased the design schematics for their stylus from the HP Jornada 54x series and sliced it in half. Ugly and like using one those flat wooden ice cream spoons from 2nd grade.
It has a 1,000 milliamp battery, and the guy told me several times it would get 8 hrs of talk time, though I am not convinced he is talking about Earth hours. 8 hrs of talk time from a side-lit 16 bit touch screen device with only a 1,000 milliamp battery? Ok bub, whatever you say.
You've seen the specs on what it can do here and elsewhere (music, take pictures, email, etc.) but as far as I know, few have had one to play with until this week. I can tell you one thing that will disappoint you and make you think twice about getting it. This thing is slow. HP Jornada 525 slow. Their sample devices had various data synced to them so I played with its inbox. It took about 3-4 seconds to launch the inbox app, than another 2-3 seconds to open an email. Then you could watch it redraw the screen line by line as it struggled to open a 15k Word DOC file with just text in it - which is cool - it has a Word, Excel and PowerPoint view, though I couldn't test the latter two. But dog slow. Lets hope the code hasn't been optimized yet, but we will need to see 50%+ improvements in speed.
I also took a few pics with it. It can take 640X480 VGA pics, and takes them pretty quickly, though with no storage slot available, you won't be able to go on vacation and leave your other camera behind. A Memory Stick model is coming. The problem was opening the photo preview app. The app itself opened quick enough, but took at least 5 seconds to display each of the three thumbnails it had stored. No way to stop it once opened from displaying thumbnails that either me or the Sony-Ericsson rep could figure out, so if your device had more than 4-5, prepare for a wait and a painful scroll process.
I know battery life is important, but not so important as to hamper the user experience. What good does it do to have 50% longer battery life if you have to use the device 50% longer to get things done?
One design decision I question is the keypad. It isn't electronic. It is just a bunch plastic buttons that push through the keypad area. When you close the keypad, it triggers an app to launch behind the buttons that tracks the buttons pushed through to the screen. Not only will this wear on the screen, screen misalignment will cause you not to be able to easily dial, and using the keypad forces you to lose whatever info was on the top half of the screen as it goes into the "keypad" app with the device menu at the top.
Those points aside, this is an impressive device, especially for a first crack. I am now more convinced than ever that mini-PC like devices are the future and that Symbian and Microsoft are on the right track with their multitasking OS's. The ability to do multiple things simultaneously without thinking about it. Zap out an SMS message, reply to an email, record a voice memo, IM chat, browse the web, the real web, not WAP or some text based facsimile that went out with the Lynx browser.
PIM is assumed. It is no longer the focus. No longer the reason for buying a device. It is just assumed that your digital device is competent at doing it. It is about communication and information. I don't know who will win this war for mobile device dominance, or if anyone will win it, but with OS's like Smartphone 2002 and Symbian out, Palm is sooooo in trouble if OS5 doesn't exceed the low expectations they presented in PalmSource back in February. The Treo, only a month old, looks so 90's already, despite being a compelling hardware design.
It has a 1,000 milliamp battery, and the guy told me several times it would get 8 hrs of talk time, though I am not convinced he is talking about Earth hours. 8 hrs of talk time from a side-lit 16 bit touch screen device with only a 1,000 milliamp battery? Ok bub, whatever you say.
You've seen the specs on what it can do here and elsewhere (music, take pictures, email, etc.) but as far as I know, few have had one to play with until this week. I can tell you one thing that will disappoint you and make you think twice about getting it. This thing is slow. HP Jornada 525 slow. Their sample devices had various data synced to them so I played with its inbox. It took about 3-4 seconds to launch the inbox app, than another 2-3 seconds to open an email. Then you could watch it redraw the screen line by line as it struggled to open a 15k Word DOC file with just text in it - which is cool - it has a Word, Excel and PowerPoint view, though I couldn't test the latter two. But dog slow. Lets hope the code hasn't been optimized yet, but we will need to see 50%+ improvements in speed.
I also took a few pics with it. It can take 640X480 VGA pics, and takes them pretty quickly, though with no storage slot available, you won't be able to go on vacation and leave your other camera behind. A Memory Stick model is coming. The problem was opening the photo preview app. The app itself opened quick enough, but took at least 5 seconds to display each of the three thumbnails it had stored. No way to stop it once opened from displaying thumbnails that either me or the Sony-Ericsson rep could figure out, so if your device had more than 4-5, prepare for a wait and a painful scroll process.
I know battery life is important, but not so important as to hamper the user experience. What good does it do to have 50% longer battery life if you have to use the device 50% longer to get things done?
One design decision I question is the keypad. It isn't electronic. It is just a bunch plastic buttons that push through the keypad area. When you close the keypad, it triggers an app to launch behind the buttons that tracks the buttons pushed through to the screen. Not only will this wear on the screen, screen misalignment will cause you not to be able to easily dial, and using the keypad forces you to lose whatever info was on the top half of the screen as it goes into the "keypad" app with the device menu at the top.
Those points aside, this is an impressive device, especially for a first crack. I am now more convinced than ever that mini-PC like devices are the future and that Symbian and Microsoft are on the right track with their multitasking OS's. The ability to do multiple things simultaneously without thinking about it. Zap out an SMS message, reply to an email, record a voice memo, IM chat, browse the web, the real web, not WAP or some text based facsimile that went out with the Lynx browser.
PIM is assumed. It is no longer the focus. No longer the reason for buying a device. It is just assumed that your digital device is competent at doing it. It is about communication and information. I don't know who will win this war for mobile device dominance, or if anyone will win it, but with OS's like Smartphone 2002 and Symbian out, Palm is sooooo in trouble if OS5 doesn't exceed the low expectations they presented in PalmSource back in February. The Treo, only a month old, looks so 90's already, despite being a compelling hardware design.
