For the last few days I have been looking at the Sony Ericsson p1i.

The Sony Ericsson p1i does seem to be a viable alternative to the Nokia e61i I am trialling (see Trialling the Nokia E61i).

The SE p1i and the Nokia e61i are what are generally referred to as Thumb Phones. My first observations are that the SE p1i is narrower and shorter than the Nokia e61i however it is a lot fatter, in terms of weight the SE p1i is slightly lighter than the Nokia e61i however they felt about the same to me and a few people I asked to hold the two felt the same. It is odd that the screen on the Nokia e61i looks much bigger when the two phones are side by side however the two screens are pretty much the same size (the Nokia e61i display is wider and shorter and the SE p1i is narrow but longer! ). The other differences I could see were that the Nokia e61i had a much higher colour range however the SE screen seemed brighter in everyday use.

The SE p1i is a nice machine – a very nice machine. I already have a Sony Ericsson k800i so I thought I would be comfortable with the SE p1i interface but it was quite different – primarily because it is geared towards using a stick pointer for navigation. Getting used to the stick for prodding the small screen doesn’t come naturally to me. I found it a little irritating that I couldn’t get out of idle mode with the stick and instead had to prod at the keys. If you are using a stick then the stick should be enough and you shouldn’t have to switch between the two? The saving grace was the scroll wheel on the side of the unit that moves the highlight up and down – you simply push the wheel to click. Underneath the wheel is a back button which comes in handy when you find you have scrolled too far or applied a little too much pressure to the click wheel.

I liked the way the SE p1i shows mail in different categories on the main screen, for example the number of Exchange emails was shown separately to the POP3 email account. In the Nokia e61i it takes a few button presses to get to the mail information you are after. The SE p1i also had an easy to access option for seeing what data throughput is like through particular gateways. I still haven’t found where this information lies on the Nokia e61i.

Application wise, the calendar applications were similar although the SE p1i had a section at the bottom that showed current appointments which was handy. However, the Nokia e61i shows calendar entries on the start screen whereas the SE p1i only shows the number of entries for that day. Time and date is more immediately visible on the SE p1i – the Nokia e61i shows an analog clock by default but it is very small and switching to the digital version improved its use greatly. The date on the Nokia e61i however is very small at the top of the screen but the SE p1i gives it equal standing with the time.

For phone dialling the digits as you enter them are larger on the Nokia e61i and I found the keyboard far better than the SE p1i – primarily because of the full keyboard. The keys on the Nokia e61i are also nicely rounded so even a big fingered person like me can use it reliably. Trying to type a message on the SE p1i was a case of pot luck and often the messages looked gibberish by the time I had finished – switching to using the stick pointer for typing messages using the onscreen keyboard was a lot easier but also a lot slower. I didn’t even try the handwriting recognition on the SE p1i so I can’t comment on that.

Web browsing on the SE p1i was also a strange experience. The web sites I tried were only displayed as text and had links to images unlike the Nokia e61i which rendered the web pages straight off the bat pretty much as I would expect to see them. This is odd as the SE p1i uses a modified version of the Opera browser so I would have expected the web site to load correctly. Perhaps there was some configuration option to change this behaviour but it wasn’t immediately obvious to me.

All in all the Sony Ericsson p1i is a great little machine and certainly turns a few heads with all its entertainment functionality – but in a business sense it’s not for me. I prefer the Nokia e61i for now and am happy with its more formal business like appearance and facilities. Mind you I plan to test the Blackberry 8820 shortly so everything could change!

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