This was another instance where a coworker was anxious to try my Sony Ericsson P800 and compare it to his Nokia 3650. So we swapped them for a week to test drive them and compare our experiences. It seems I always get the short end of these swaps. My first impression was that it seemed comfortable in the hand. The screen was fairly large, bright and clear enough to be used outdoors. The circular keypad roused my curiosity enough to go thru with the swap. Also I was anxious to test the video recorder function and its usability.

What features did I like.

Video Recorder. This feature allows you to take a short video clip and send it via MMS or Multimedia Messaging Service, email, Bluetooth or infrared port. The video clips are very short at a maximum 15 seconds or approximately 95KB in size. The video clip format is 3GPP which is the standard video file format for MMS. Everything went fine until I tried to send a clip via MMS. The system dropped the connection twice. But it did go thru on the third attempt. I checked my test e-mail on my desktop and the video clip played fine. The quality was very grainy but I expected that given the extremely low resolution. As shipped, the video recorder did not record the audio along with the video. I had to download a utility from the Nokia website to enable audio capture.

Digital Camera. This allows you to take pictures at either high, normal or basic quality settings. You can take a maximum of about 40 pictures on high, 60 pictures on normal and 150 pictures on the basic settings. Images can also be taken in standard or night mode, at 640x480 resolution. In portrait mode, the image resolution is only 80x96 pixels. Images can be rotated if needed and are stored in JPEG format. The phone is however capable of displaying images in jpeg, gif, png, tiff, mbm,bmp, wbmp, ota and wmf formats. Again when I viewed the pictures on a PC, they seemed extremely good compared to the Samsung SGH-v205. The Nokia 3650 captures images at 640x480 resolution, which is the same as the Sony Ericsson P800.

Real One Media Player. This software allows you to play a variety of files like 3gp, mp4, amr, rm, ram, ra and rv formats. I loaded an mp4 clip from the movie Matrix onto a MMC card to test playback. The quality of playback was superb. It clipped just once thru a 15-minute video file.

Loudspeaker Mode. This sufficiently increases the speaker volume to enable you to use the phone without putting it to your ear. (like a speakerphone) The microphone range however, is limited. Anything over two feet and the caller won’t hear you clearly. This was convenient while driving but I still prefer to use my Bluetooth headset with the Sony Ericsson P800. It is much more convenient.

Night Mode feature for the camera allowed for decent images to be captured in medium to low light conditions. When set to night mode, the exposure time is longer. This means that the phone needs to be held very steady to avoid blurring. I however could not seem to eliminate the blur when shooting in the early twilight hours. I had to steady the phone against a solid object like a tree or a table to reduce the blur.

Memory. The phone comes with about 3MB of memory which is shared between the various applications, such as the digital camera, the video recorder and the phonebook with voice tags, etc. This can be expanded with external MMC cards. This feature makes this phone extremely versatile. The memory can be used to store and transfer a wide range of multimedia files. These postage stamp sized MMC cards are readily available in a variety of capacities.

Connectivity options. Any of the various format media files can be shared or transferred via MMS, E-mail, Bluetooth or the Infrared IR port. I found the IR port to be easier to connect to my notebook and my iPAQ h5455 Pocket PC compared to the Samsung SGH-v205 Camera Phone.

Symbian OS which is similar to the Sony Ericsson P800, was fast and responsive. Add-on applications and games can be downloaded and installed.

Cut, Copy and Paste capability is enormously helpful in creating and editing text messages.

Big Bright display. The 4096 color display is 176x208 pixels in size. Images are scaled to this size to fit the display screen.

What I did not like.

-Even though this phone has bluetooth capability, I could not use my Sony Ericsson HBH-30 Bluetooth Wireless Headset with it. After much massaging, I finally succeeded in pairing the two but for some reason the headset just would not work with this phone. As usual Sony Ericsson and Nokia are blaming each other for their mutual incompatibility. Personally I feel this is a negative for both manufacturers. Bluetooth technology was designed to provide seamless wireless connectivity. They sure didn’t consider ruthless proprietary branding issues.

- Nokia claims 8 days standby and 4 hours talk time. In my usual rigorous daily use, the phone gave me a paltry 2 hours 45 minutes of talk time. In comparison, my Sony Ericsson P800 easily gave me close to eight hours of talk time.

- At first the round keypad seemed refreshingly different. But I found it difficult to get used to it after having so many phones with standard keypad layouts. After a few days it just seemed gimmicky. The eye-catching layout looks good but really doesn’t serve any practical purpose.

- No touch screen or stylus capability. This single feature makes the Sony Ericsson P800 much more user friendly over the Nokia 3650.

Other standard functions.

- XHTML browser with shortcuts, Java capable.
- Calendar with to-do-lists and alarms.
- Calculator, Music Composer, Unit Converter, Notes, Clock, Alarms, Voice memo recorder, games.

Specifications.
Tri Band GSM/GPRS 900/1800/1900
Dimensions: 130x57x26 mm
Weight: 130 g

The Bottom Line:
This is a decent camera phone. However it is simply out classed and out performed by the Sony Ericsson P800.

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Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 450.00