Sony Ericsson P1i review

The software will pick up the name, various phone numbers, email address and Web site details listed on the card. You can then review the information to check it's correct and save it as a new contact. We tried it on three business cards and it got two completely right, while on the third we only had to change two numbers and one letter. In other words it works surprisingly well and is a really useful feature that we could see ourselves making constant use of.

There are plenty of other neat business features on offer including support for Blackberry's Connect service, which will push emails to your phone as long as you pay the subscription fee. You can also use the QuickOffice for creating as well as viewing documents on the go.

It's not all work and no play, though. The P1i can also turn its hand to a spot of video and audio playback. The audio player is especially impressive with neatly laid-out controls and support for extras such as album art, not always found on music phones. The sound quality is also very good via the supplied headphones that double as a hands-free kit.

Performance
Speed-wise the P1i is a decent performer. For the most part, applications load quickly and screens refresh with the minimum of fuss. It also seems to be better at multitasking than previous Sony Ericsson smart phones. No doubt this is due to the healthy helping of 128MB of onboard RAM -- twice what the older handsets had.

Despite all the nifty features and the speedy performance, however, we still found it hard to really fall in love with the P1i. The reason is that it just isn't a very user-friendly phone. The handset is built around the UIQ 3.0 user interface which remains unchanged from the P990i. The main issue is that it can never really be driven by a single form of input. You find yourself constantly swapping between the keyboard, the touchscreen and the wheel at the side in an effort to get the handset to do what you want.

The handset has a 3.2-megapixel camera on the back

Certain tasks are also way too convoluted and there still seems to be some bugs in the software. For example, we had lots of headaches setting up the Wi-Fi connection.

Rather than just selecting an access point and entering your password key, you have to go through a process of creating an Internet configuration before you can log on. Once our handset was given all the correct settings it still refused to connect to our Netgear router. In the end we were only able to get it to connect by turning off WPA encryption. Seeing as we've used this router with a range of other smart phones without any problems, we can only assume that it's a bug in the P1i's Wi-Fi software.

Another issue that affects usability is the battery life. It's acceptable when you just use the P1i as a phone, but once you start to really make use of the extra features, such as Wi-Fi and 3G data download, the battery starts to drain faster than on many of its rivals. In fact, we only got around three and a half hours of talk time out of it.

Conclusion
The P1i is certainly a big step forward from the P990i. It's a more neatly packaged handset and as a result feels a lot more comfortable in your hand. Multitasking performance is much better and we love the new business card scanner software.

It's still a long way from perfection, though. We're not convinced of the benefits of the weird keyboard layout and the interface still presents users with a steep learning curve. It's a shame really, because under the bonnet there are lots of very cool features.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield