just to let you know

me and my P900 - review after week 1

It has been exactly one week since the long-awaited parcel from O2 finally arrived. Contents: one P900 plus Southwing Bluetooth headset.

I was very excited when I first received it and still am - although after a week the gimmick and gadget feeling usually slowly dissapears and you start using a Phone/PDA in a much smarter way.

The UI is brilliant and very intuitive. Both Sal and me didn't have any problems to use applications right "out-off-the-box" without browsing through the fairly large manual (printed thankfully).

So what have I done so far with it and what am I using it for? Well, since I have been terrible with remembering dates etc. the P900 now finally has taken the place of my old (and recently almost unused) Palm m100. It's just great not having to carry 2 devices around with you (phone and organiser), but to have both in one device. Making calls with the P900 is a quite different affair when you are used to a Nokia phone. As far as phone functionality is concerned, I think Nokia has it down to a T - they're the best. However, if you're using a phone/PDA, your talking a completely different ball game. I'm not saying that the P900 is complicated to make phone calls with - it's just different. I'm failry used to the "applications" button now to access most functionality when the flip is closed. So far, I have not made up my mind whether to remove the flip or not (Sony supplies a tool and cover should you want to remove it). I think over time it might actually go, as I very rarely key in numbers into the phone, accessing numbers through the address book instead.

One thing I started enjoying already is to be able to synchronise my contacts and calendar entries over Bluetooth onto my Macs. It's great to know that you constantly have all addresses etc at hand when you need them. The only problem I now have outstanding is to migrate all "unregistered" email addresses into my Addressbook on my Macs and then sync them across all devices. Reason for this are those email addresses that I never added to my contacts and simply enter the first letters of their names when writing a mail using Apple's Mail app.

Bluetooth in itself is not as seamless as it seems though. I might have to do some more investigation and research some support forums, but whenever I switch the d-link bluetooth dongle to the other Mac for syncing, iSync is not having it. I have to un-pair and re-pair both devices - eh voila, the whole thing works again. I also had the P900 Bluetooth app crashing on me a few times. Before I had a Task manager, this usually meant powering the P900 on and off, but now I can simply end the hanging task. One great thing about Bluetooth is Blueshare from Blarg Software though. It enables you to share a internet connection via Bluetooth with a Mac using Opera. Shame is though that there doesn't seem to be a way of downloading you email via this connection. I'm still looking for a Newsfeed app such as AvantGo - which I used on the palm and loved - but have not been successful so far. I tried a Newsfeedreader called FeedBurner, but didn't like it. Mainly because it only opened links to the actual feeds in the standard browser (which always connect over GPRS) and not in Opera, where I could use the Bluetooth connection to the ADSL line. Also, I was not sure if reading newsfeeds in such a way will really be somthing I want to do. I'm still keen to get AvantGo working (currently in Beta version for Symbian UIQ) - I therefore emailed AvantGo and was told that AvantGo *should* sync over a shared bluetooth connection. However, I haven't had the time to test this yet Watch this space.

All in all, I'm more than satisfied with my new little pal and would always buy it again.

Posted by Michael at August 5, 2004 11:27 PM