Sony Ericsson P990i

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Features
Of course, the Sony Ericsson P990i wouldn't be a smart phone without a ton of features to please the mobile professional. Previous P910i users and tech-minded consumers will appreciate the new and improved Symbian 9.1 OS and UIQ 3 software platform, though it may involve a learning curve to those not familiar with the operating system. One of the biggest upgrades to the P990i is the inclusion of Wi-Fi support, which isn't a feature found in a lot of other smart phones. Along with 3G/UMTS support, the P990i is certainly a well-connected phone.

	The P990i comes with a Memory Stick Duo slot.

Let's begin with the basics. Each entry in the P990i's address book can hold up to two phone numbers, an e-mail address, a picture caller ID, a birth date, a street address, and notes and can be assigned to a group as well as one of 23 polyphonic ring tones. The P990i comes with 60MB of internal memory, plus a 64MB Memory Stick Duo included in the package for additional storage. Business users will be especially pleased with QuickOffice, which lets you view, edit, and create Word and Excel documents, a viewer that lets you read PDF and PowerPoint documents, and a built-in VPN client. There's also a video phone feature that utilizes the front VGA camera for video calls. Though this may be intended for videoconferencing, we can't imagine this being too useful for the average consumer.

Other basic features include text and multimedia messaging, a speakerphone, a calendar, a task list, a notepad, a calculator, an alarm clock, a voice recorder, a vibrate mode, a business card scanner, a stopwatch, an RSS feed reader, and a full Opera Web browser. For connectivity junkies, along with the 3G/UMTS and Wi-Fi support, you can also use the phone as a Bluetooth modem with your Bluetooth-enabled laptop. For e-mail, you can connect via SMTP, IMAP4, and POP3 accounts, and the P990i even supports push e-mail for the BlackBerry via the BlackBerry Connect solution. The included PC suite helps you manage all of these PIM functions and more.

	The P990i takes excellent photos. (click for larger image)

And if you thought that wasn't enough, the P990i comes with quite a few multimedia features. First, there's the lovely 2-megapixel camera with autofocus and flash. Camera settings include four different resolutions (1,600x1,200, 1,280x960, 640x480, and 320x240), a macro setting for close-up shots, five white-balance settings (Auto, Cloudy, Daylight, Fluorescent, and Bulb), five different effects (Black & White, Sepia, Solarize, Negative, and off), three quality settings (Fine, Normal, and Economy), a night mode, four shutter sounds and an option to turn it off, and a self-timer. You can also shoot in a burst of four shots at once, or with a frame. As for the video recorder, there are four resolution settings (128x96, 160x120, 176x144, and 320x240), and the video format is MPEG-4 with QVGA 15fps. We thought the picture quality was excellent with well-defined tones and colors, though videos appeared a little washed out and grainy.

The P990i also has an integrated music player that supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, and WAV files, and we were very pleased with the music player's interface, especially with how easy it was to scroll from one song track to the next. The video player supports 3GPP, MP4, and RealMedia video streaming. This is quite handy, as there's an online module in the Media Player section of the P990i that lets you store links to your favorite streaming audio and video sources for quick playback. In addition, the P990i has a built-in FM radio, though it can be accessed only when connected to the wired headset (to be used as an antenna).

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