To be honest, I was a genuine fan of Nokia phones all my life. Almost all the handsets I used till now were Nokia. I am not a person who will change handsets every 2-3 months. I like to really extract every drop of juice from the handset and then I move on. Till 2-3 months back, I was using Nokia CDMA 1110. A very basic model which was offered by my previous employer. Well, as long as I did not have to pay the usage bill, I was not complaining of using the lower handset and of the fact that I was not able to change the handset (CDMA, what else can I say!!)
Incidentally, I also bumped against Moto Razr V3i (this one I had presented my wife as her birthday gift). I went onsite for 3 months and as CDMA was useless out of the country, I carried the V3i. And Boy, it is a great handset !! I loved it. The style, the features, the camera, the expandable memory.. It was all very refreshing for me, especially after using Nokia basic models for years. :)
3 months back, I changed my company and that gave me an opportunity to look for new handsets. Suddenly, I found myself exploring all brands, all models. At one point of time, my family got bugged up, as much as I was into exploration, I was getting confused as well. Finally, I decided my criteria for new handset in terms of features and ceil value for the price.
Features:
- Touch screen : Short listed : Moto Rokr, SE P1i, Moto Ming.
- Any version of Office : Moto Q9, Nokia E series, Nokia communicator, SE P1i.
- Wifi : SE P1i, Nokia Communicator
- 3+ MP Camera with Flash : SE Cybershot series, Nokia N75, SE P1i.
- Price : Within 20K : All the above except Nokia Communicator.
Being a software guy, I took logical decision to go for P1i. I read thousands of reviews and got to know about the good features it offers and also some of the drawbacks. This ensured that there are no surprises for me after I buy the handset.
Now, after using this handset for 2 months, following is my impression of it.
The things I liked:
- Usability – the touch screen and the jog dial give a very convenient way to explore all menus, options.
- Features – this handset is master of all. It has tons of features.
Applications and utilities: Business card scanner is something I loved the most. Handwriting recognition is quite good. It also comes with office suite. A decent desktop tool for file transfer, sync, Blackberry email support, a couple of decent games. FM Radio is nice, although option to store only six stations is a drawback. - Communication - wireless lan, Bluetooth, USB interface, GPRS, Video conferencing (N/A for Indian networks).
- Memory – it came with 128MB on board memory which outranks many other competitor models in the same range. It has a hot-swappable mini SD card slot. The handset package included 1 GB card which seems enough for me.
- Camera – Camera for still shots as well as video. 3.2 MP still shot camera can work in many modes. The flash accompanies the camera. The image quality is nice but not something to die for.
- Battery Life – Once fully charged, with moderate use (10-20 calls in the day and 1 hour of listening to music on speaker phone), the battery lasts for 3-3.5 days which I think is pretty good. Also the better thing is that it takes less than an hour to recharge a fully drained battery.
The things I did not like:
Keypad – Though it possesses a full QWERTY keypad, it is not the easiest to operate. To reduce the size of the handset and to reduce the number of keys, SE has introduced dual keys. i.e. if pressed on the left side of the key, a different character is printed and if pressed on the right side of the key, a different character is printed. So, for every letter user has to think where the character is located, and then he has to decide which side to press. - VGA camera – Apart from the 3.2 MP camera at the back of the handset, another VGA camera is fitted in front top-left corner. It can be used for video calls. But as in India, no operators support this, it is useless. I would have like to have an option to get rid of this camera and reduce the cost.
- USB charging – Not sure what the root cause is, but I found USB charging works too slowly. It took almost 7-8 hours to get the battery to 80% charge level.
Also accompanying the handset is a desktop charger. Basically it’s a handset stand which can be connected to power plug for charging. As this is not very convenient to carry around, I seldom use it. SE also gives you 10 software choice points. These can be used to download some SE p1i related software. It is not very enticing as there are not many options available at 10 points. This is more of a advertising gimmick. :)
I do not want to stretch this article longer, so I will move to conclusion. I love this handset and I am waiting for lower GPRS charges by our telecom operators to make optimum use of this handset. I will recommend this handset to all those who want a stylish touch screen monster with tons of features, more importantly a 3.2 MP camera.
Adios,
Aamod Joshi
