Digital Trends

Sony Ericsson P910a

May 17th, 2005 | by Brandon King

Accessories and Software

Included accessories consisted of the phone itself, USB docking station, replacement bottom edge (discussed earlier), stylus, stereo headphones with built in mic, 32MB Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick Duo to Memory Stick Adapter, cleaning cloth, and belt clip case. Applications include Phonebook, Datebook, Tasks, Calculator, Web browser, QuickWord (MS Word viewer), QuickSheet (MS Excel viewer), PDF+ (PDF viewer), Sound recorder, video and photo capture and viewer, MP3 player, Alarm Clock, Chess, Solitaire, and File Manager. The File Manager can be used for installing zipped applications, such as NES emulators, expense trackers, and Opera's web browser. Themes can be downloaded to change the appearance and ring tones. The background can be customized for open and closed flip use, with the closed flip background supporting animated gifs. MP3 ring tones of any length are supported, but only the first 10-15 seconds — you cannot select what part of a file to play as the ring tone.

The Details

Supported audio formats include MP3, MP4, M4A, WAV, AC, AU, AMR, RFM, iMelody, and G-MIDI. There is a third party audio player that includes Ogg support. Supported image formats include JPEG, GIF, MBM, WBMP, and BMP. For video, as you might expect, only MPEG-4 is supported, but the P910 can play files or streamed clips through 3GPP support. The integrated camera can take pictures as large as 640x480 (VGA), with various settings for indoor/outdoor lighting conditions. One thing we would like to see is the ability to rotate the screen so that previews are larger. Image quality was decent, but like anyone with a camera phone has come to realize, the integrated cameras are better for quick snaps where quality isn't an important concern. We found the camera quality to be on par or better with other popular camera phones. Also, stored pictures can be displayed for contacts and shown when they call.

Technical specifications are impressive for such a small device. The phone is powered by and ARM 9 processor, and runs Symbian OS v7 with UIQ interface. The phone has 64MB built in, and a Memory Stick Pro Duo slot - the same memory format supported by the PlayStation Portable. The screen weighs in at 208x320 with 18-bit color, although the camera supports full 24-bit color. The browser supports WAP 2.0, with a host of security features, and email support for POP, IMAP4, and SMTP is standard with support for attachments.

It should be noted that our experience came from transitioning to the Symbian OS from the Palm OS. We found the learning curve manageable, and most of the comparable applications easy to learn. We did have some issues getting our data to transfer from Palm Desktop to Outlook and had to settle on reentering some information.