After playing this baby for few days, I finally decides to sit down and write a proper review of it. Let's start with outer look of this baby. Well I can say that compared to my previous Nokia N70, P1i design was more classy and it doesn't have the cheap look (or should I say plastic look?). It appears to be more solid than Nokia N70. The only reason that I can find is that you can always change the housing of Nokia N70, but Sony Ericsson P1i, you can't. That's also one of the pain as you have to be very careful on P1i in order not to leave any permanent scars or marks on it. P1i has a fine brushed surface on its front which makes the whole phone appears elegant. The bad thing about this was the brushed surface actually very fragile to scratches. The brushed surface was actually very thin, and once it was scratched, what's left is only the black color which is the original plastic surface under the brushed surface. Besides the brushed surface, another fragile component was the chromed camera shutter button. The chrome will starts to fall off if you use the button too often. This is bad as the camera button of N70 was chromed too, but I had used it for almost 2years, it still in perfect condition.
Putting the outer shell aside, in terms of hardware of course P1i is way better than Nokia N70. P1i was not even half year since it was launched compared to N70 which was launched several years ago. It has a pretty decent 3.2 Megapixel camera that comes with auto focus, and the speaker able to produce quite a clear sound. The battery was quite strong compared to Nokia N70, as with my normal usage, 1 or 2 calls, medium amount of texting (around 50), few minutes of WiFi usage, the battery last me for 2days. That was pretty good, as my Nokia N70 average serves me around 1.5days before it gone flat. As for the key layout, I was getting hard time on typing using P1i rockers QWERTY keyboard. I would prefer the traditional keypad layout just like W960i. Till today, I still thought that I can just typing using the numbers key. Eg: 228 for CAT.
As for the software and the core Operating System, P1i uses Symbian UIQ3 and comparing to Nokia N70 S60 v2 platform, for me it's quite similar in terms of the way to get application installed. As in UIQ platform, it has the touch screen features, you have to do most of the things on screen instead of hitting the keys in the keypad. I still haven't fully suit myself into that kind of environment yet honestly. One simple example would be in S60 platform, we can do multiselection by holding the pen button down and choose what to select through the d-pad. However in UIQ, there is no pen button nor the D-pad. Furthermore the checkbox of the UIQ was really small so it test your aiming skills as well when you try to do multiselection.
One major things that turn off P1i as a great device was the UIQ3 itself. This OS has been put on market more than 1 year ago if I've not mistaken. However application development for this platform seems to be slow and unsuccessful. The best example would be Adobe Flashlite, which it was still not available for UIQ3 up till today. This makes P1i crippled to render flash files which embedded on the webpage even though P1i has the WiFi connection capability. It's quite annoying to see people that using Nokia N80 a 2 years old phone streaming youtube and yet a few months old P1i doesn't capable of doing that. We also know that P1i has an infrared port, where it can be used as universal remote control for house appliances such as aircond or television. However up till today, P1i still can't do that due to inavailability of such application that support UIQ3. There are more examples that you can find where great applications only developed for S60 but not for UIQ3.
That's my first review on P1i. I will write into more details on the review when I have more time. J
