Sony Ericsson P900 unveiled
Sony Ericsson unveils the P900 – a flagship
multimedia smartphone
20 October 2003
At simultaneous events in Las Vegas and
Beijing today, Sony Ericsson unveiled the much anticipated P900
smartphone, to be available starting next month. Building on the
successful P800, the P900 is smaller, faster, simpler and more
flexible than ever before. With significant upgrades such as video
recording capability, 65K colour touch screen, and increased memory,
the P900 is not only a high-quality camera phone, but also provides
full PDA/organizer functions as well as a good gaming experience.
Persistent rumours of a follow-up to the successful
P800 have preceded the launch, proving the strong interest for
Sony Ericsson’s Symbian-based smartphone offering among
application and content developers, corporations and consumers
alike. The wide range of applications available for download turn
the P900 into a device that can do much more than making voice
calls, thereby increasing its value for both consumers and operators.
The P900 is based on Symbian OS v7.0 and the established UIQ user
interface. Symbian is the largest-selling operating system for
smartphones.
The inclusion of a video recorder is a significant
addition to the multimedia facilities of the P900. It is a VGA
still camera and can also record video clips as long as the memory
allows. It uses the QCIF picture size with MPEG4 video compression
which is the standard supported by 3GPP. A video clip is approximately
1 MB per minute and can be inserted into MMS messages; also video
which has been streamed to the P900 from elsewhere can be inserted
into an MMS message. The P900 is a QuickShare™ product,
incorporating the ease of use principle that Sony Ericsson first
introduced in the T610. QuickShare™ has won consumer praise
for being the smartest way for mobile imaging on the market. Not
only can a picture be taken with only two clicks, it is also easy
and intuitive to share pictures between the phone, a PC and other
consumer devices - either locally over Bluetooth, Infrared or
cable, or across the mobile phone networks with MMS or e-mail.
The P900 will start shipping to EMEA and APAC markets
in Q4, for US in Q1, and the P908 will start shipping in China
in Q1.
Viewing images and video on the P900 is a pleasure;
the P900 screen has improved colour depth, i.e. 65,536 colours
compared to 4,096 colours in the P800, and images can be viewed
across the full size of the screen and in wide screen mode. This
of course makes the P900 a highly apt device when relaxing. There
is a wide range of downloadable Java and Mophun games for the
phone, and included on the CD is the very popular racing game
V-Rally1, in a 3D edition which is taking mobile gaming to a new
level not seen before. The JogDial™ is used for accelerating
and together with the polyphonic sound, stereo headphones and
3D landscape details; the game play is getting closer to a console-type
gaming experience.
The flash memory has been increased from 32 MB to
48 MB ram and this has increased the available user memory up
to 16 MB. Additional storage space is available by using Memory
Stick Duo. A 32 MB Memory Stick Duo is included with the P900
and Memory Sticks up to 128 MB capacity are supported, which makes
it easy to create a music or video library, on several Memory
Sticks. Private home videos can be scaled down using Packet Video
recorder on PC so that you can show friends and relatives snapshots
from your holiday break. The P900 features a complete MP3 music
player and also comes with a selection of innovative MP3 ring
signals.
The P900 browser supports HTML, WAP and cHTML content
types within one single browser. The much praised Opera browser,
which is designed to display practically all Web pages on the
Internet, comes on a CD with the P900, or is available for download
on www.sonyericsson.com. When viewing Internet content through
this browser, pages are reformatted to fit inside the screen width
and eliminate the need for horizontal scrolling, providing a fast
and pleasant mobile browsing experience.
Starting today, there are also on-line phone update
services available from sonyericsson.com.
They allow consumers to download the latest version of the phone
software directly to the phone without having to visit a service
centre. The CD-ROM enclosed with the P900 provides a generous
selection of software and applications for productivity, connectivity
and entertainment.
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