I recently bought the P800 smartphone by Sony Ericsson. After using it for about a week, I'd like to give my impressions and opinions on it for the sake of anyone here who might be interested in getting one. Just be advised that your mileage may vary, for I will most likely be a different user than you, you will be a different user than someone else.

Anyway, despite some negative feedback from members of the board (David, mostly), I wanted a phone like the P800, so I decided to risk the possibly negative points raised and take a chance on the phone. These comments aren't totally unjustified, however, and I'll comment on them later.

First of all, I really like the phone. It's comfortable in my hands, the flip is much less flimsy than I expected it to be (though still somewhat flimsy), and the screen is much easier to clean than I thought, though much harder to keep clean than I anticipated. With the flip up, the buttons reacted better than I thought they would, though the buttons on the side are tough to depress. I happen to be a fan of the jog dial, and I'm glad they included one on the phone. The rolling motion could be better, but I like the 5-way aspect, which makes you feel like you have more hard buttons on the phone than you actually do.

As for the software on the phone, I agree that this needs a lot of work. Right out of the box, there is plenty missing from the phone that makes its UI atrocious. However, most of this can be solved by third-party software. The indispensable bits of software, IMO, are:
The Opera browser:
It seems SE decided that their own browser is so bad that they supply Opera on their installation CD.
Tracker:
The program adds a desktop screen where you can place shortcuts to commonly used applications as well as time and date info, and you can customize the backround with whatever image you want. The program also includes a schedule overview page, a file system viewer, and a task manager. I don't use the shedule page, but the other two are absolutely essential. The phone its self does not come with a manager for the files. Each application somewhat deals with files it finds in premade folders which gets a bit annoying. The task manager is also important. Many of the programs on the P800 (third-party and included) provide no way for you to actually close them. You can have 15 programs running (not great with 4MB of memory, over 600 of which is taken up by the phone application its self) and not have any way to close them. The task manager makes it easy to run down the open applications and close them. You can also use Tracker to assign a "close program" command to one of the jog dial directions. I chose to have another of my directions open up the task manager.


The operating system of the P800 is not that tough to get used to, though I can see how some people may not like it much. It has some design flaws that make it difficult to use, but I almost see Tracker as a way around that. It helps that much.

Now, I'm not saying that David is wrong in his impressions on the phone, but I'd like to give my reactions to them now that I have tried the phone for myself:

The camera doesn't have loads of dead pixels unlike the 7650, but the overall quality is lower, plus no low-light mode

It is true that the camera quality is fairly poor. I wish it were better, but I think it's good enough for quick captures to send to friends from my phone.

The Opera browser is very good and reformats complex pages very well, but the platform is a little slow to manage it quickly and resizing then displaying JPEGs takes time

It does take some time, and unfortunately Opera does not format all pages well. It has some difficulty with WAP sites (look up a map on Mapquest, and the zoom controls are not there). However, like you said it does reformat most pages to a very usable format for such a small screen. Some pages even look better

The email client supports scheduling

It's great to get a little buzz every once and a while to notify me of new email

The device isn't really designed for one-handed use and even if you do use it that way, it is akward to keep one finger on the scrollwheel and your thumb on the keypad/screen unless you have very big hands. The Nokia's 'nipple' control is far more useable and intuitive than the multi-way wheel, which is narrow, sharp-edged, fiddly to use and feels cheap

Well, I would agree with that for the most part. With the flip open, it really is impossible to use the phone with one hand. With the flip up, however, I have no difficulties. I can dial a number, scroll through menus with the jog dial, and take pictures with the camera button all with one hand.

Aesthetically and usability-wise, the UIQ interface sucks. It feels like the UI was designed by programmers more interested in cramming in features than usability or good interface design

I agree. It's the biggest shortcoming of the phone. I believe the second itteration of UIQ is out, but there's no word on whether SE will allow P800 users to upgrade to it.

The docking station is cheap and nasty and is fiddly to place the phone on

Agreed. I have no clue why they didn't make it slide into something with a real back to it. Sure, I suppose the phone looks cool in the station, which sort of makes it look like it's standing on its own, but when you try to tap the screen with no back support, the phone keeps bobbing back, which gets really annoying.

No profile support - you can set different ringtones for car, headset, etc, but it isn't enough

It's certainly enough for me. I don't need different levels of ringers. Plus, you can do some very cool stuff with the two profiles (more later on).

Lastly, you disliked that it had no predictive text. I don't miss that at all. My old phone had predictive (T9) text, and I hated it. It would only recognize the word about 60% of the time, and when it didn't you had to erase the word and enter it like normal, basically making it take twice as long as usual. I'm not an SMS-crazed phone user (like most of Europe and Japan ), so it doesn't matter much to me. Sure, it takes a while to write an email, but it would if I had T9 in there too. There is no substitute so far for a good old keyboard.

The last thing I want to talk about is the community for the P800. It is so sad that I will never find a community quite like the empeg community for any other product I will buy. There are several message boards for the P800 (Howard Forums, My-Symbian, and more), but most of them are filled with...well...less than the bright and helpful people at this community. If this phone had the same set of people owning it, there would be a perfect operating system on it, there would be T9 (for those who wanted it ), we would have the coolest programs written for it, and someone would probably be making some crazy hardware accessories

That said, there are a few programs that I quite enjoy:
MiniGPS:
No, it's not a mapping program, but one that determines cell information. It detects the ID of the cell you are in, and you can program events to coincide with certain cells. For example, if you enter your work cell, you can have the phone set to turn the volume off. If you enter the cell where your hospital or airport is, you can automatically set the phone in flight mode. Very cool, IMO.
SMSPlus:
Mmmmm, Sega Master System and Game Gear games on my cell phone... delicious It still needs work, but just to see these games like this...wow. There are also emulators for Game Boy (normal and color), Commodore 64, early Sierra Online adventure games, and even a MAME port.
IM+:
Basically just an IM client. Works with ICQ, Yahoo, AIM, and MSN.
VNC:
There is a VNC client that works with various versions of the VNC servers (I'm currently running TightVNC).

I also like that there is a large online website with many program downloads and trials and a message board at www.my-symbian.com


To wrap it up, I have to say that I like the phone very much. It's everything I expected it to be and one of the coolest toys I've ever owned (#3 behind the empeg and Tivo ). I am a different user than many, though. I don't write much on my PDAs, so viewing is the important thing for me. In the first week of owning the phone, I've only made about 5 phone calls, but I've browsed the internet like crazy, downloaded tons of programs, chatted on AIM, and checked lots of emails. It's just so very cool.

I'm sorry for the long review, and I'm even more sorry it wasn't very well written. I just wanted to put my thoughts down on paper. It doesn't form a cohesive (or even coherent) review, but it may give some impressions on the phone for those who are looking Thanks for your time