Images
If your average mobile were a sleek yacht, this would be an aircraft carrier with a full complement of planes and helicopters, an auxiliary deck-scrubbing team, extra bars of soap and more ship’s cats than is strictly necessary or hygienic. In other words, it means serious business but can also do pleasure – all at the cost of size.
Tablet PC or smartphone?
The specs of the P990 make it sound more like a tablet PC – Wi-Fi, QWERTY keyboard, touchscreen and an armour-plated partridge in a neatly trimmed, sturdy pear tree. That means it’s good for surfing the net, typing out emails and organising your schedule.
The simple Symbian interface makes it easy to either tap your way through the menus using the stylus or scroll around with the jog wheel and, despite the touchscreen, you get a proper keypad for dialling numbers. As with its P800 and P910i forebears, it’s also talented in the mobile gaming department.
It’s unfortunate, then, that the handset’s too big to carry without worrying about the size of your pocket bulge. The massive girth is partly down to its 3G ability but we’re tempted to say it wasn’t worth it.
Tech Specs
- Bluetooth
- Yes
- Dedicated MP3 player software
- Yes
- Digital zoom rating
- 2.5x
- FM radio
- Yes
- Main camera resolution
- 2
- Memory card slots
- Yes
- Memory card type
- Memory Stick Duo/Pro Duo
- Operating system
- Symbian OS v9.1
- Optical zoom rating
- n/a
- Screen resolution
- 240x320
- Standby time
- 400
- Storage
- 80MB
- Supported music formats
- MP3
- Talktime
- 9
- Triband
- Yes
- Video resolution
- 1600x1200
- Wi-Fi
- No
- Xenon flash
- No
Comments
PavPev
5 years ago
I am a huge Sony Ericsson fan so I had to get my hands on thier market-leading handset. I've owned it for well over a year and it has been brilliant for most of the time I've had it. It's overwhelming at first, it really does do just about everything you can imagine, stick a few Gigabytes of memory into it and it's a music, video and photo viewer too! Once you get used to it you start to see it's new Symbian UIQ operating system struggle when it tries to do multiple things at once, and you'll need to keep going into task manager to manually shut down high memory-useage programs to run new ones, lest it freezes or reboots itself - almost as frustrating as some PC's, and that's not what you want from your phone. However, SE released a patch for the operating system that has really pulled it through that rough patch. It now runs quite a few tasks seemlessly and switches between them easily, even auto-ending those high memory tasks to free up more memory. Since then it has never frozen or rebooted on me, so SE really got it right with this one. The size is undeniable, it is big. It's definitely more suited to the inside pocket of a suit jacket than your jeans pockets where it's a slight squeeze. The screen is lovely and big, you can watch a subtitled film quite easily on it, but the qwerty keyboard isn't really any quicker to use than standard keys, except for special symbols. This phone was supposed to wow the market but ended up being a slight let down at release, that has redeemed itself since, especially with the OS update. It's also a great foundation for SE to take the UIQ OS into it's new handsets and make it work with no bugs. However, in this new age of N95's and iPhones, it's keeping up, but its age is starting to show.