BECAUSE I LIKE the SonyEricsson P1i more than my P910i, I'm really hesitant to release my grip on it and let it land in the lap of James Corbett. But James has assured me he will run it hard and give me some feedback as a totally uninitiated user of a touchscreen jog dial wifi 3G multimedia phone. This phone won't appeal to digital natives who text while driving or to those holding out for a low megapixel, low bandwidth, iPhone. However, it has served me well for nearly a month by reducing my costs while simultaneously increasing my information flow. This is the most practical 3G videophone I have ever used because of its form factor and smart handling of communications protocols. I use it most of the time while mooching on free wifi nodes for downloading mission-critical mail, skimming through a well-populated collection of newsfeeds on FreeNews and handling GTD task lists with AquaCalendar. The phone does not hit all the hot buttons for everyone, largely because of its rocker keys and tight resolution.
The P1i uses a rocker key system and that means its keys are set up in QWERTY fashion. For the uninitiated, it's a major rethinking of how to text. It took me a week to adjust and then I discovered the phone has one of the best-engineered predictive text systems in the industry. I hate predictive text but love the way it works on the P1i.
The P1i's screen is crisp and elegant. It reminds me of well-lit mood lighting systems because it reacts like sunrise and sunset when it alerts to advise you of messages in quiet mode, of connection requests when near Bluetooth neighbours, and of calendar alerts when programmed to remind you. However, the sharp resolution means more information crams itself into a small space. If you're as stubborn and refuse to use eyeglasses even though you know you should, some of the P1i's screens will appear blurry to you. And this is a real issue when you try to run stuff on the phone by hitting icons with your finger. From personal experience, I know that when things look blurry, fat fingers cannot get them to respond.
I have a lot more to do with the P1i and our hopes is that its on-board business card scanner (comes embedded as a standard item) can prove helpful on the Paddy's Valley tour. We also plan to put two-minute elevator pitches on the phone and then to run them on plasma screens with a Bluetooth SCART adapter during OpenCoffee and maybe when with interested listeners in the States. These uses will evolve if the phone meets with James Corbett's approval.
For the time being, I've packed up the phone, its charger and a small 512MB memory chip (keeping its 2GB brother with my MP3 tracks) for James to use. Let's see if he can operate the phone without a user's manual because that's the way most of us muddle through new technology anyway.
SonyEricsson P1i: the phone I used and some photos taken of it.
