Come try, come buy the P1i
25 March 2008
It is not often my 12 year old son thinks I'm even luke-warm, let alone cool, but I certainly earned some brownie points when I road-tested Sony Ericsson's P1i.
I thought I might be able to give a 'yoof' slant to this review and so asked what he liked about it particularly. " 'It's an Ericsson", was the full, unedited reply, which, if EPD paid for contributed articles by the word, would have been a crowd-pleaser with the accounts department here. However, being a roving reporter, eager for the facts behind the story, I decided that if a job's worth doing you have to do it yourself. I refused to let him take it to school to show the other diligent pupils and adopted the phone as my own for a while. Using my own SIM card meant total ownership and I set out on a journey of discovery to find out why Ericsson has captivated the teen pound so completely and if the appeal spanned the generations.
It is certainly compact and lightweight, only 130g, for fitting in school blazers/handbags although still a significant size to put on a table to let others know that you have a cool phone. Which apparently is important. We've all seen men in suits at lunch 'unpacking' their mobiles 'in case the office calls' in the hope that their lunch partner will ask about the new model positioned by the bread plate.
To be precise it is 108mm x 52mm and a slim 6mm deep. Very nifty. The display takes up nearly half of that area, measuring 40mm x 50mm. This is important as the best thing about the P1i is the graphics. Especially those on the golf game. Many a happy hour's 'research' was spent analysing that little beauty. No train journey is too long when you can flick a stylus for a perfect round.
Actually, that stylus was the only downside to the P1i. It is a 'stand-out red' topped affair, which makes it easy to identify but a little less sophisticated in design terms. I manage to use it even though the inner plastic part had clearly snapped and was held together by the outer metal casing. It takes more than that to thwart a Hayes Review. No, it was when it dropped to the floor, from about waist height, and snapped in two that I knew my golfing days were numbered. In fairness, I did not use the stylus much, partly because I did not have the patience to 'teach' the P1i my handwriting - it thought everything I wrote was a number so using the keypad was easier. The touchscreen was so efficient that I tended to use that to bring up contacts and appointments. The software was intuitive, which is a joy in itself, I hate drop-down menus and folders in folders when all I want is to see what day my birthday falls on this year.
The large screen is of course also the camera viewer, which is auto-rotating and, although only 3Mega pixel takes some pretty well-lit, focused images. That, the MP3 player and the FM radio is where the appeal lies for my son and his peers. It is not so much a phone as a Swiss army knife of gadgets to impress and amuse. If everyone was equipped with one of these at the airport, there would be no ugly scenes this summer when the French air traffic controllers or ferries go on strike as soon as the schools break up.
For business use, it is a classy little mobile, but I did have some niggles. For instance, when putting in a reminder, the alarm can be set for a time that has already gone. If I need to set myself a reminder to check train times, for example, then I am clearly so forgetful/overworked that I don't need the hindrance of checking the alarm as well. The other foible which threw me was that if the phone is turned off, any alarm or reminder that has been set does not go off. I have never come across this before, an alarm is set to remind to do something even when I have remembered to save the planet and switch off the phone for once.
A very minor niggle is the short time it takes for the key-lock to activate. Every text was prefaced with a "grrr" as I had to go through the unlock process before composing my message. And the keypad. Why can't phone manufacturer agree a UKP (universal key position) so that every phone's hash key is the space key etc? The Ericsson phone was particularly ingenious, which, of course flummoxed me initially. In time, I grew to appreciate just how clever the company has been to minimise the keys and to maximise the characters but at first there was lots of huffing and puffing as I keyed in an exclamation mark instead of a space. The QWERTY keypad design is very clever, although from using a three-letters per key phone it took some getting used to but was so effective that I cussed my old phone when I had to revert to using that. On the P1i, the keys are shaped so clearly that although each has two characters there is a defined left and right side of the key to hit for the character required.
I even used it to make phone calls - radical I know, but it's true. Call me old-fashioned but over and above the add-on features of cameras and MP3 players, the ability to hear the person the other end is one of my basic criteria for choosing a phone. Luckily, the P1i does that well too. The sound quality was excellent.
The really impressive part of the P1i is the battery life. It was six days before I had to phone up to request a charger! (Some swine had 'forgotten' to return it from an earlier review.) The fact that the battery kept going for nearly a week before frantically rooting through the packaging while accusing Mr H of meddling and Hayes Major of purloining it, highlighted just how economical with power it is.
The P1i is an extremely well-designed phone. Power-conscious and inventive with all the 'toys' that make it a talking point as much as a talking instrument, but it is let down by a shortfall in some of the PDA-like features required in a business phone, but then who wants to do business when you can listen to music while improving your golf - maybe this could spawn a two-phone strategy for everyone, one for work, one for play.
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