Life with the Sony Ericsson P910i

The saga continues. To reiterate, the P910i is a great device. It does it all: phone, decent camera (still only VGA but a vast improvement over my previous T610), video, web browser, works with ichat, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, email, calendar, contacts, reads word, pdf and excel files and a crap load more things. It has completely replaced my Palm and cell phone. For my purposes, it works as advertised and does the job with style. I purchased it unlocked from Avi at World Wireless in Beverly Hills. I use it with T-Mobile and have had no issues.

I have had more time to work with the phone and wanted to elaborate on my previous post. So, here goes. f I have any complaints its because i’m a Mac person. If I used Windows, I would have nothing to complain about (except Windows). The phone includes software for Windows which works perfectly to sync the phone with Outlook, install apps, etc. using the included usb cradle or bluetooth. If I didn’t have a Windows machine around, I would not be able to install any software as far as I can tell. Nor would I be able to update any of its software or the phone’s firmware using the Sony Ericsson update service. That’s a bummer but I can get around it.

As for iSync and bluetooth, it has been an interesting few days getting that to work. I was able to pair the phone just fine with my G5 and Belkin bluetooth adaptor. When it came to the services page, the only two things available were to use the phone with address book (good) and as a modem. Sadly, the option for sync was not available.

Undaunted, I launched iSync and looked for new devices. To my happiness, the P910i showed up and I was able to add it as a new device and then proceeded to sync it for the first time. It all worked perfectly. Contacts and calendars were carried over and the sync had no errors. I though that was it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

Subsequent attempts proved unsuccessful unless I first paired the phone and the computer again to establish the relationship prior to using iSync. If I did that, it worked. If not, iSync gave an error that it could not communicate with the device. I even went to far as to try it with Tiger but met with similar results. I hope nobody at Apple is reading this as I might have just violated my NDA but if you are, how about an iSync update please? This should be an easy fix.

Even that workaround didn’t last though. It stopped working at all after a few more attempts so I looked around for another solution. No third-party software is available as of yet (at least that I know of) which will allow me to sync with iCal and Address Book. After much research, I found a couple of sites devoted to making the P900 work with iSync. Those hints and tips seem to have done the trick. Even though they apply to the P900 and in iSync it now says P900, it works fine. The work-around involves editing of a couple of plist files so it isn’t for the novice but after I did it, syncing worked again and has worked on subsequent attempts over the last week.

As for other practical considerations like reception quality or battery life I can say that I have never used a better phone here in LA. Calls go through and don’t get dropped. Some of the credit probably goes to T-Mobile but the phone performs well. I get reception where others, even fellow T-Mobile users, do not. So it has to be the hardware that is superior as well as the network. It is somewhat of a battery hog although I have never run out of power yet. I do plug it in to charge every night and also have a charger in the car, just in case.

So really, my only major problem with the device is how it works with iSync which isn’t the devices fault. Other than that problem, which now seems to be solved (at least for the moment) I love it. I do wish there was more software for it too, like for Palm, but I think that’s coming sooner rather than later as more devices start to use the Symbian OS.

As I continue to put it through its paces, I will post some more updates.