I wasn’t fond of any phone ever since I got my N70 as it has all the features I ever wanted and everything was working perfectly (albeit lagging) until my phone got stolen.

I needed a phone, badly and quickly.

Not knowing what to get for myself this time, I turned to other people’s opinions and a number of them recommended the Sony Ericsson P1i. While I am not a Nokia die hard fan, I prefer Nokia due to its user friendliness and high compatibility.

Looking at all the phones and N-series by Nokia, none of them caught my eyes. I decided to just jump right in and make the switch to Sony Ericcson, hoping that it would turn out decent and me not selling it away.

RM1620, with a 1GB Memory Stick Micro (M2). It was slightly more expensive than the price my friend offered me, but it was two days before Chinese New Year and I needed the phone badly.

Weighing at only 124g, the P1i feels rather sturdy, sleek black and silver casing, with black keypads and a little red to distinguish the numbered keypads. On the left hand side, you have the jog dial and cancel button while on the right hand side, there are the shortcut button, camera button and Memory Stick Micro (M2) slot. On the front, you have a mini camera (for video call) and a brightly lit and stunning 240 * 320 pixel with 262,144 colour screen.

Another feature of the P1i is the touchscreen capability. Although it is a touchscreen phone, most of the time, you would find yourself switching between keypads / fingers and the stylus. The touchscreen feature is far from being perfect, considering that Apple iPhone is fully usable by tapping with your fingers only. There is a slot to store the stylus on the top left part of the phone.

Flipping the phone over, you have the looks-very-much-like-a-digital-camera camera side. Equipped with a 3.2 mega pixel and auto focus camera, you can take really decent pictures with the phone. By setting it to macro mode, you can even take macro pictures. There are many options for you to play around with, such as white balance, burst mode, video, special effects and on-the-spot editing, you name it, they have it. In case of dark environment, you have two LED lights to brighten up your subjects to give you a clearer picture. Nonetheless, it is still a camera phone and you should not rely on it to capture precious moments or fast moving objects. As for me? The camera is just for MMS purpose.

A sample shot taken while I was cruising around the city during Chinese New Year. Not too bad, I would say. Not sure about night shots though.

The phone fits nicely into my giant palm but not the keypads.

The keypads is a full QWERTY keyboard and each button has two alphabets on it. It took me a day or two before my fingers got used to it and able to punch the right alphabet. Of course, you have the option to write your text but I reckon you can type five times faster than writing on the screen. However, for Chinese text, its faster to write than type.

It does what a mobile phone supposed to do, make and receive calls, send and receive SMS, calenders, clocks, alarms, notes, games and the basics.

I shall not go into details of those puny stuffs but rather highlight the more important functions of the phone. The most useful feature of P1i got to be the WiFi. With WiFi included, it opens up a whole new world of functions and convenience. It is practically a mini computer where you can check mails, reply emails, read blogs, surf the internet, chat and etc.

With BlueBerry installed, I can read blogs easily on my phone now. In fact, I even tried to blog on my phone before and the post worked just fine. To fully utilize the screen space, you can switch the browser to landscape mode by tapping on the landscape button. Unlike Apple iPhone, it doesn’t auto rotate.

By logging into Ebuddy, I can even log on to my MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger and chat. Wicked! Another feature that I really like is the built in RSS reader. I can now subscribe to the blogs I read all the time and read them on the go, without having to login to my Google Reader. However, there’s no import function and to visit all 108 blogs to subscribe the RSS is going to take really a lot of time. I tried loading Google Reader on BlueBerry, the result wasn’t that good.

It comes with a cradle, that acts not only as a charging station, but also as a file transfer station. Connect all the relevant cables and you can transfer files to and fro your phone and notebook easily and without much troubles and at the same time, getting it charged. Whenever you plug your phone into the cradle, there’s a green light emitting from the bottom of your phone, pretty neat, if you ask me.

Overall, the phone is simply stunning and powerful because you can install any applications you found on the Internet into your phone. For example, Tien Soon installed an application that turned his P1i into a GPS system. Hence, one really need to dig out some really cool programs and incorporate them into his or her P1i to make it even more feature packed.

However, there are also a number of things that I didn’t like about the phone.

1) It takes a great deal just to send and receive a MMS (especially those above 1MB), as most of the time, the connection times out. I never have such problem with my previous Nokia phones.

2) Reception of the phone is not decent enough as I get no / low signal quite often. It doesn’t know which to pick for best network reception, often, I find it alternating between a one bar signal strength 3G network and a full bar signal strength GSM network.

3) While the task manager feature is supposed to ease the user when switching from one application to another, I reckon its not that useful yet. Also, whenever I close an application, it should be closed right away, not running in the background, taking up the memory. In other words, the more applications you open, the slower your phone is. You need to close them ala Windows’ task manager style to gain back the used memory.

4) The overall speed of the phone is on the disappointing side. They should have put in a bigger internal memory or a faster processor.

5) Vibration is not strong enough to notify the user. Come on, I need vibrations, not some tingling sensations!

It is a nice phone to use, but its going to take a wee bit of time to get used to it due to the small keypads and such. While the software speed is not hair pulling yet, I reckon its just a matter of time before it does.

P/S : For those who are in Malacca and wants to buy mobile phone and any accessories, do contact Yeong Kit at 016-6444662 as he always give me a very good deal. You can check out his price by visiting his very simple website at http://mobilespec.com.my/.