General

On 10th October 2005, Sony Ericsson announced to launch next generation smartphone having Symbian Operating System. Sony Ericsson P990 will be the first ever handset that will be available commercially adopting Symbian Operating System Version 9.1 and UIQ-3 Software platform.

Sony Ericsson P990 is a tri band GSM handset supporting GSM 900, GSM 1800, and GSM 1900 along with the support of UMTS (3G) network. The handset will be available commercially for shipping during First Quarter 2006.

Sony Ericsson P990 is available in a single stylish color, Premium Silver. Hopefully Sony Ericsson will manage to launch the handset in other different colors as well.

The Symbian OS powered P990 is considered as a follow up of Sony Ericsson P910 and also represents the upgraded version of P900, which lead the market for quite a long time.

Variants:

Sony Ericsson P990 has been launched in two variants.

P990i Dual mode UMTS (2100MHz) - GPRS 900/1800/1900 for Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa
P990c Dual mode UMTS (2100MHz) - GPRS 900/1800/1900 for Mainland China.

Interface

The new designed keyboard is positioned beneath the flip-down keypad which is over the main body. This makes it quite easy to use. Sony Ericsson P990 will offer four different hardware keyboard variants including QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY and Russian. The smart phone will also be providing touch screen support.

Besides the input from basic keyboard the smartphone also provides some other interfacing means like 3-Way Jog Dial and dedicated buttons are also provided as interface to the smartphone.

Design & Display

Sony Ericsson P990 is not a light weight handset and weighs relatively more than most of the handsets, especially in these days. The handset weighs about 150 grams (5.3 oz). This may be because of the reason that Sony Ericsson has integrated a lot of diverse functionalities which resulted in an increase in weight. The dimensions are quite reasonable as compared to the weight of the handset. The dimensions of the handset is 114 x 57 x 25 mm (4.4 x 2.2 x 1 inches)

Sony Ericsson P990 is equipped with TFT touch screen display supporting 256K colors with resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. The display screen sizes about 42 x 57 mm. The display is much better than most of the handsets, consider the Sony Ericsson's releases W550, K750 and W900 and Nokia's E-series, they all are equipped with either 65K color screen. So Sony Ericsson P990 has taken lead in providing a better display to consumers. Neither of the above mentioned handsets support touch screen, but Sony Ericsson P990 is capable to support. The smartphone handset allows the use of screen in landscape mode.

Battery Life

Sony Ericsson P990 is equipped with Standard battery Li-Ion that gives about 9 hours of GSM talk time and the handset can survive in stand by mode for about 400 hours (more than 16.7 days) in a single battery charging.

The battery performance of the handset both in Stand-by mode and talking mode is quite satisfactory. Rather I would say that Sony Ericsson P990's battery is giving extra ordinary performance, Earlier on I was thinking that Sony Ericsson W550's battery was the best of all giving a talk time of 8.5 hours but Sony Ericsson P990's battery is even better than that. I would certainly say that overall Sony Ericsson is providing the best batteries for the handsets in the market; no body is there to compete in this. Nokia has tried to do so in their E-Series handsets, providing talk time of about 7 hours, but that was a good attempt and Nokia still needs to rework again.

Multimedia Facilities

Sony Ericsson P990 is incorporated with an advanced music player, Mp3 Player and MPEG-4 player. The handset has support for Mp3, AAC, AAC+, EACC+ and M4A along with play lists support. The handset also contains the dedicated music access buttons to cope with the music player. The handset also has a FM RDS Radio which can be used to listen to live music transmission over the air.
The handset also supports the multimedia streaming and the supported formats are H.263, 3GPP and AAC.
The handset is provided with Flight Mode option that allows listening to the music via music player even when the mobile phone is switched off. So there is no way that you can not amuse yourself with this smartphone.

Camera

Sony Ericsson P990 is equipped with advanced 2 mega pixel CommuniCorder 24 bit color depth camera supporting 2.5 x digital zoom, auto focus and camera light. The camera adds the ability to record video clips on one hand and allows making video calls on other hand.

The camera is much similar to the one which Sony Ericsson has provided in the earlier handsets like K750i and W800i.

The digital zoom for the camera is less than that is available in some other handsets, like Nokia's 3250 is also equipped with the 2.0 mega pixel camera but it supports 4 x digital zoom, so this can be a considerable point for Photographic users.

Video Conferencing

Video conferencing is only possible through Sony Ericsson P990. The smartphone, by default, includes an application, Video Telephony that is there to support video calls and video conferencing via built-in dual cameras available in the handset.