Introduction

In the beginning of 2003, Sony Ericsson introduced the P800, a phone unrivaled at the time. It featured PDA functionality, digital camera access, MP3 capabilities, and robust text messaging options. All while most phones on the market were still grayscale.

With the progression from the P800 to the P900 and now to the P910, Sony Ericsson hopes to continue the technological dominance. By introducing a QWERTY / numeric keypad combination, improved screen display, and versatile applications platform built on a Symbian OS, the P910 will surely catch consumers' attentions.

Design

The design of the Sony Ericsson P910 is similar to the P900, with a large touch screen and flip situated on the front. The P910 operates in two modes as well; with the flip open, and closed.

When the flip is open, the full 208 x 320 px 262K TFT touch screen is visible. Additionally, a built-in QWERTY keyboard is located on the underside of the flip. So users can choose between three possible text entry modes: the flip keyboard, the onscreen keyboard, or handwriting recognition.

With the flip closed, the P910 can be used like a conventional phone. The outer side of the flip is a numeric keypad. Navigating through menus can be easily achieved with the 5-way jog dial.

Another option is to remove the flip completely. In this case, the P910 would operate in flip open mode only, with the addition of an optional virtual flip.

Located along the left side of the P910 are a covered stereo headset socket, 5-way jog dial, and infrared eye. While the right side contains a slot to hold the stylus.

Positioned on the back of the P910 is a lens for the built-in camera, a mirror for taking self-portraits, and the loudspeaker grille. Charger and accessory connectors are situated on the bottom.

Camera

The widespread popularity of camera phones has all but saturated the market, and the imaging capabilities of the P910 are top notch. The built-in camera, called a CommuniCorder, is able to shoot still pictures and video recordings. Photos captured with the P910 can be taken at sizes of either Small - QQVGA (160 x 120 px), Medium - QVGA (320 x 240 px), or Large - VGA (640 x 480 px) resolutions, while providing 24-bit color depth at 16 million colors.

The CommuniCorder may be used in both flip modes. With the convenience of the flip closed, fast point-and-shoot pictures are possible by using the screen as the viewfinder. For situations that require more camera control, users can shoot photos with the flip open. In addition to the viewfinder on the screen, supplemental graphical controls are shown to access camera settings.

The robust set of camera settings available for image correction include Picture Modes (Video, Auto, Night, Indoor, Outdoor, Message Picture, Message Video), Image Size, Image Quality (High, Medium, Low), Video Size, Brightness and Contrast, Lighting (Automatic, One of four preset values), Delay Timer, (1 to 25 seconds), Picture Freeze Timer (1 to 10 seconds).

Images taken are stored in the P910's memory. Storage space is shared with other applications, thus free space can vary considerably. However, approximate image sizes are 50 KB for VGA, 16K for QVGA, and 3 KB for QQVGA.

When recording videos, however, resolution is fixed to 176 x 144 px (QCIF). The resulting files are encoded using real time 3GPP, H.263, or MPEG-4 compression, together with Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) compressed sound. File size is roughly 1 MB per second of recording.

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