Have P910i, will travel

The Sony Ericsson P910i is a solid choice for people who want a phone, a personal digital assistant, a digital camera, a camcorder and an MP3 player all in one compact device that they can take with them when they travel.

At 115 x 52 x 24 mm and just 155 grams, the P910i is one of the smallest smartphones in the market. Still, for someone with small hands used to tiny phones, any device in this class – the P910i included – is bound to seem a bit large.

Unlike its predecessor, the P900, the P910i now has a real tiny fold-out Qwerty keyboard that makes it much easier to type out messages. Don’t try using your thumbs to type though because it seems impossible to do that and keep the phone from flopping over. I found the traditional hunt-and-peck approach works much better – and small fingers help. There are no cursor keys on this tiny keyboard, so if you make a typing mistake, you’ll have to use the stylus on the touch-screen to make corrections. Like the P900, the P910i also uses JotPro, a handwriting recognition system that lets you input text by writing on the touchscreen when the keyboard is flipped open.

These days, we tend to forget what phones were originally designed to do. I’m happy to report that the P910i is a capable tri-band phone so making voice calls is no problem while abroad. Another thoughtful feature travelers will appreciate is that you can set the P910i on "flight mode," which shuts off the phone function so that you can use the PDA features even when you’re on board a plane. Of course, you may have some explaining to do to the flight attendant who may not immediately grasp the difference.

A jog dial on the P910i’s left side makes it much easier to scroll through menu items and find the contact you need in the phone book.

As we’ve come to expect from Sony Ericsson, the 260,000-color, 208 x 320 pixel screen is sharp, clear and bright.

The phone comes with some really useful software, too, beyond the usual phone book, task manager, calculator and e-mail. The best, for me, are Quickword and Quicksheet, which allow you to view and edit documents created in Microsoft Word and Excel. To complete the picture, Sony Ericsson makes it pretty easy to synchronize the P910i with your PC, so it’s no problem moving files back and forth between the two devices.

This same ability makes it easy to back up the contents of your SIM and restore them when needed. I did notice a quirk in the way the phone handles SIM memory. When I first inserted my SIM card and tried the phone book, I noticed I couldn’t access all entries after the letter "R." Only later did I find out you must tell the phone book to get its entries from SIM memory.

The P910i has a number of other improvements over the P900. Instead of just 16MB, we now get 64MB plus a 32MB expansion card. This makes a lot of sense especially if you’ll use the P910i to carry bigger word processing and spreadsheet documents.

The larger memory is good, too, for storing MP3 and other music files that you can listen to using the built-in music player.

The camera is unobtrusive and quiet – perfect for snapping photos of sleeping kittens that tend to spit and hiss at everything that comes within half a foot of their whiskers. You can also use the camera to record snippets of live video.

The quality of the pictures from the VGA camera, however, is not at par with those taken by other high-end phones. This means the images are fine for viewing on the phone, but not that sharp when you transfer them to a PC.

Still, the P910i more than compensates with excellent functionality, elegant design, loads of features that help the traveler, and support for multimedia messaging and wireless connectivity through GPRS and Bluetooth.