One phone to rule them all

The competition in smartphones is fierce and smaller and faster devices seem to hit the market every week. As one of the pioneers in the sector, Sony Ericsson, has fallen behind the pack, but is quickly making up for lost ground. It recently introduced its new pocket-size and complete mobile office smartphone to the region, the P1.

Building on the feature set of earlier models, the Sony Ericsson P1 supports a wide range of push email solutions and web browsing applications, plus connectivity via hi-speed UMTS and Wireless LAN (WiFi^TM).

With its compact size and multimedia capabilities, the P1 is getting close to the complete mobile office. It is based on the Symbian^TM operating system (v9.1) and UIQ 3.0, an open platform that offers broad potential for multimedia applications from operators/carriers, content owners, and third party developers. The Sony Ericsson P1 offers a rare input choice of handwriting recognition (with a stylus) or the dual function keyboard (full alpha-numeric text input combined with one hand phone usability).

Connectivity options on the Tri-Band GRPS phone are also plenty including: push email (with support for Exchange and BlackBerry servers), integrated WLAN, and VoIP. This ensures high-speed web browsing and data downloads, plus email at a rate and performance comparable to the office desktop, while the VoIP capability enables internet voice calls.

Being connected while on the move is now a normal part of working life, and the P1 gives you the ability to handle your corporate or personal emails, contacts and calendar wherever you are. It offers support for remote email wiping and PIM data; critical in the event of the phone being stolen or misplaced. The Sony Ericsson P1 allows you to read and edit documents on the move, whether its using Microsoft Word, PowerPoint or Excel, and comes complete with a desk stand and USB cable in-box, making it straightforward to synchronise with your PC.

The clever device sports a large 2.6" touch screen with a transflective display and a 3.2 megapixel camera with business card scanner. Surfing the Web is intuitive thanks to the Opera^TM web browser that displays pages in horizontal, widescreen aspect. The large, touch screen QVGA display can be seen and used in any environment, while the camera takes great shots to store or share via "Picture Blogging" and is also a useful tool for work purposes. The card scanner is one of the business-friendly innovations that are making their way to smartphones. It does away with the need to collect stacks of business cards when travelling. Just take a close-up shot of a business card and the card scanner transfers the contact details directly into the phonebook.

Finally, the Sony Ericsson P1 also serves as a multimedia companion. The 512MB memory stick provided allows users to listen and watch to a decent amount of content, while the on-board FM radio augments the stored music. All in all, the P1 is a welcome addition to business users who also want their phones to be portable entertainment machines.