Soft Arts

My cell phone is a Sony Ericsson P900. It is without question one of the finest trappings of geekdom that I have ever owned. I love it. Let me say it again: I LOOOOOVE IT.

I have had this phone for almost two years. In that time I have also used the Blackberry 7290 and the HP 6315 smart phone. Unfortunately, neither of them worked out for me, so I ended up coming back to my beloved P900 early this month. Since I also own a Tungsten T3, I’ve pretty much decided that even a Treo 650 probably wouldn’t be as great as the mighty P900. More on that later.

Man, what a phone!

Unlike other convergence devices, the P900 is a phone that can be used as a PDA, as opposed to a PDA that can be used as a phone. This design philosophy works a lot better, at least for me.

As a phone, it has all of the features I would expect in a good mobile phone: speed dial, an address book, easy voice mail access, and key lock. My P900 has never pocket dialed anyone, where as my Blackberry and Ipaq did it continuously.

The P900 is a phone, and it is meant to be used like a phone. Phones are frequently pressed against the speaker’s face when talking. With the P900 and the Blackberry, this is no problem. With a Windows Mobile 2003 based phone, this frequently results in the random selection of various soft menus on the touch screen. Looking at the display after finishing a call with the HP 6315 was always a bit of a surprise: I never knew what was going to be running.

• Bluetooth
  The P900 is a great GPRS modem and works great for connecting to the internet with my laptop when I’m on the road.
• Excellent J2ME Support
  Midlets work very well on the P900, plus they can run in the background (which doesn’t happen with PalmOS).
• Push Email
  I got hooked on Push Email with the Blackberry 7290. Now that I’m back on the P900 I have it set up the same way and it works great.
• SSH
  Tragically, I am some times called upon to troubleshoot a server crash while I’m
  out of the office. Putty has been ported to the P900, so I’ve been able
  to use that to log onto the servers from the phone and straighten things out.
• Instant Messaging
  I have clients, coworkers, and friends on AIM, Yahoo IM, and MSN Messenger. IM+ lets me talk to all of them, plus it will run in the background while I work on other things.

Honestly, the only real complaints that I have about the P900 have already been addressed by the P910: bigger keys on the main side of the flip, a QWERTY thumb board on the back side of the flip, and more memory.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 19th, 2005 at 8:38 pm and is filed under tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.