Sony Ericsson P800: A power phone

It’s a gadget hound’s dream.

Sony Ericsson’s P800 phone-and-PDA combo is something I’d wished for many years ago, when lugging a phone, a personal digital assistant, a digital camera and an MP3 player started to weigh me down. Now the P800 is here in all its power and beauty, and all I need to lighten my load is to lighten my bank account – by P39,000.

The P800 is Sony Ericsson’s first attempt to break into the high-end phone/PDA market.

First things first: this isn’t a phone for everybody. The price tag alone should rule out 98 percent of the population. Then you’ve got to trim the remaining two percent further to remove the technophobes. That’s because you do need a certain level of technology smarts to make use of some of this phone’s high-tech features.

At P39,000, this isn’t a phone you want to lose. The mere thought of doing so would turn most people’s knees to jelly. Still, the P800 has enough features to justify its hefty price.

Running on the Symbian 7.0 operating system, the P800 is a tri-band GSM 800/900/1900 phone with Bluetooth and infrared capabilities built in. The unit itself is quite a handful at 117 x 59 x 27 mm, but with all the features Sony Ericsson crammed into this smartphone, this is not a big surprise. The P800 uses an ARM9 processor, and loads applications satisfyingly fast.

The P800 comes in a cool electric blue case, which blends well with its 12-bit VGA touchscreen that offers 4,096 colors. I found the display’s quality to be excellent and better than some PDAs in the market when it comes to displaying photos and videos.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the P800’s jaw-dropping features that I tried:

The Communicam. Pictures taken with the P800’s 300,000-pixel built-in camera can be sent via MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), Bluetooth or infrared. Like in many other mobile phones today, the photos can be attached to phonebook entries to make incoming calls more interesting. The photo’s size and quality (up to 640 x 480 pixels, 16 million colors) can be adjusted using the P800’s image editor. You can also add sound and text to your photos when you send them out.

For a phone, the P800 takes pretty good pictures outdoors. There’s no built-in flash, however, so indoor photos may appear dark. The Communicam is on the back of the unit, with no shutter to protect the lens so be careful not to scratch it.

The PDA. The P800 can easily keep you glued to it as you explore a long list of applications that immediately become available when you flip the keypad to reveal the phone’s PDA personality. In full-screen mode (flip open), the P800’s digitizing area is exposed. Using a plastic stylus, you can scribble on the screen or click on the applications of your choice.

The P800’s handwriting recognition software doesn’t force you to learn new ways to write the alphabet, numbers and symbols, which is an improvement over other PDAs in the market.

From PDA mode, users can see all of the applications that come built-in with the unit as well as those that can be uploaded separately.

Connectivity. I love the way this phone-PDA hybrid handles e-mail, Web and WAP browser access to the Internet at speeds of up to 28,800 kbps. This GPRS phone also supports Bluetooth for wireless connection to other phones, PCs and other Bluetooth-enabled devices.

One quibble: the infrared port is on the side of the P800, which means you have to worry about keeping your fingers away from it when you’re holding it in place to beam data. Perhaps they should have moved the port to the top side of the unit instead.

The P800 also comes with a SyncStation accessory that lets you synchronize your PDA data with a PC using a USB 1.2 port. The phone comes with software that will enable you to synchronize your PDA with applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes and Lotus Organizer.

Diversions. First in this category are the games. I’ve never seen games on a mobile phone load up so quickly, or play with so many colors and at such speed. Two games are included free with the P800 – MIB2: Alien Attack and Stunt Car Extreme.

Then there are the audio and video players. The unit I tested contained video clips from a Disney animation movie and from a recent Jackie Chan film. Although the movie clip viewer is only about the size of a stamp, the video plays wonderfully, especially if you remember you are watching it from a cellular phone.

The P800 can handle MIDI, MP3 and other audio formats that can be turned into ringtones or alarms. There are also at least 16 polyphonic ringtones built in. There is a stereo headphone jack for listening to MP3 or other music clips.

With the P800, you can also try doing some animation and wallpaper design using a variety of preloaded images or your own pictures.

Other Extras. Navigating the P800’s menu is also possible using its five-way jog dial. It takes a little getting used to it, but soon you’ll find it so convenient for scrolling up and down the menu screen and calling up specific applications.

Speaking of extras, it’s easy to make room for all the things you can upload on this cool phone. Aside from its 12 MB internal memory, the P800 comes with a 16MB Memory Stick duo card for keeping JPEG, GIF and other memory-hogging files. The Memory Stick slot is right under where the stylus clips to the phone, which some people may not like. You also need to remember that the Memory Stick is proprietary to Sony and there are no third-party manufacturers, which means prices will be higher than, say, compact flash.

A neat touch is the P800’s Flight Mode setting. In this mode, the P800 shuts off its phone functions so that you can still use it as a PDA, even while flying.

This review scratches only the surface of what the P800 has to offer. As the saying goes, experience is the best teacher, so give the P800 a try and discover the best of both worlds in this phone and PDA in one.