P800 phone calls the tune

A lot of people have been looking forward to Sony Ericsson's long awaited - and much delayed - P800 model, if only to see whether it is really possible to have a phone that doubles as an organiser or personal digital assistant and is compact enough to carry around in a shirt pocket.

Sony Ericsson (SE) has already impressed mightily with its T68i, a featherweight phone with camera attachment and all the bells and whistles including Bluetooth. But it wasn't enough to restore SE's flagging financial problems. For that they need a successful family of phones.

Had the P800 come out when it was expected to last autumn then it would have looked even more innovative than it does today when built-in cameras are taken for granted. Now it has to make up a bit of lost ground.

The P800, which weighs 150g, is the first phone with decent handwriting recognition on the screen enabling you to write down notes in Jotter mode with a stylus as they occur to you.

The words are then transcribed to digital form unless you opt to keep your own handwriting. The upper part of the screen recognizes numbers and the bottom half of words. It is actually quicker to type in web addresses than to use the (stylus-driven) keyboard.

Once the retractable clamshell-style dialing keyboard has been opened it has the biggest colour screen of any phone I have come across.

The P800's built-in camera beats the Nokia 7650 for resolution, though the zoom facility is better on the Nokia, as is the ease with which you can send multimedia messages.

The calendar feature on the P800 is better than Nokia's similar looking one, mainly because it is slightly bigger and you can enter information by writing with the stylus.

I went to SE's website and filled in all the details to get them to send my phone an instant text message to enable the phone to connect with my POP3 server. That part went fine, but the phone call wouldn't make the connection to the internet until I had inputted a few more details which hadn't been included in the text message.

But it was worth the hassle. The phone successfully read Word and Excel attachments that had been sent to my POP3 email address. The P800 was big enough to read an 8k Excel document down eight columns and across 12 rows on a single screen. It's impressive stuff, and easily the best I have come across on a phone. SE claims that the phone can also handle PowerPoint and Acrobat documents, and I have no reason to doubt it.

Other features such as video replay and audio worked impressively well. Indeed, it is a reflection of how quickly we have taken these amazing facilities for granted that mention of them comes so late in this review.

The phone comes with a couple of games (including a very playable version of chess) and is kitted out with Java for downloading the growing number of Java -based games on the web. The phone also comes with a cradle enabling it to sync with your PC, which I wasn't able to test.

In conclusion, I only had this model for a few days and kept blowing hot and cold over it depending on how well it is working (a fuller report will appear in Online after more experience has been gained).

If full-production models work to the specifications claimed it will be a very impressive phone. But, as with some previous Ericsson phones, there is a slight feeling that technology may have been running ahead of usability. The P800 will be coming onto the UK market within the next month or two at a price yet to be announced. Make sure that web access and email settings are working properly before you leave the shop.