Visser Labs

First major upgrade for the P1i has to be putting those tinny provided air-buds in the bin and getting serious with quality headphones, welcome the entry level Motorola S805 Bluetooth DJ Headphones, snap it up from $120 AUD and upwards.

Whats Included

From the first peek this set glow quality with leather finishes on all parts and putting them on feels great, the headset comes with:

• a carry bag for travelers including standard power connectors for most regions
• wall charging-outlet, and
• a stock mini-headphone to 3.5mm stereo jack, in case your battery runs out or youd prefer to be wired

Functionality

The S805 is made up of a prominent call button on the left drum for voice dialing and hands-free, on the right is a play/pause button for head banging tracks. My only criticism is how the buttons feel and work, made of plastic with orbing blue backlights it has deep impression presses it makes the phones feel cheap.

Handwriting for the P1i is an art, there I said it! You either get it or you don’t, and for about a fortnight I had no freaking idea what was going through the UIQ departments heads when they did handwriting for mobiles!

Handwriting Areas of the Sony Ericsson P1i

Let’s start with the basics, notice that triangle glitch that appears randomly halfway up the screen on the right, it turns out that it appears on purpose indicating handwriting regions when creating message, or filling out fields. But how does a triangle help me write?

Using Handwriting for the Sony Ericsson P1i

As an emerging technology far from simple, characters written below the half triangle on the screen are lower-case while those above are numbers, any letter that crosses the half way triangle from either side is uppercase.

Holy crap, I feel like someone’s taken a kidney or a vital organ without my consent. Global Roaming with Vodafone Australia is a joke with reforms desperately needed both for billing and services.

Global Roaming Costing Criticism

A 10 minute mobile call between an Australian roaming mobile travelling in New Zealand and a Australian mobile costs $35.00, that’s $3.50 a minute, ouch!?

Last time I checked… thats not enough time to:

• call a loved one
• answer some questions, or
• have a real conversation

Whats the point of Global Roaming in trying to ‘connect people’ if its easier and even recommended by Australian Vodafone Customer Care just to buy a new SIM in the country you’re visiting and leave your damn mobile number at home. It defeats the purpose of roaming abroad if people take that action.

Denied Access to Customer Care

A second hiccup in current Global Roaming services is that roaming users cannot recharge or communicate with Customer Care unless they have adequate credit for the length of the call. Roaming users are charged full per minute rates while calling Customer Care.
In cases where you’ve used your purchased credit you are forced to make an international call to Vodafone Customer Care on +61414141414 from a landline or payphone in order to have a functioning phone again.

Vodafone Australia have some serious work to satisfy the needs and budgets of future roaming users. With our help and feedback they can place priority on resolving these serious issues one at a time.

Are you a Global Roaming customer, leave a comment about your experiences below.

It doesn’t take long for Sony Ericsson’s new flagship smart-phone the P1i to make a heavy impact on day to day mobile activities. This is my second smart-phone after retiring my i-mate after a night of clubbing; PDA’s don’t take kindly to falls, or being trampled on!

Take a look at what’s under the hood of this mobile beast.

Specifications

Screen

• 240×320 pixel
• 262,144 colors
• Resistive touch-screen

Inter-connectivity

• GSM networks (eg. Australia)
• 3G networks (eg. 3, Vodafone, Telstra)
• 801.11b wireless

Memory

• M2 support (up to 4 GB)
• Internal memory 160MB

Overview

Now, to start it’s a damn sexy phone with an arsenal of features! I’ve broken up my review into different topics, the P1i is a fantastic phone and I invite you to read and decide for yourself, this phone is far from a pushover and will change the way you look at your current phone.

• Interaction and touch screen on the Sony Ericsson P1i
• Keyboard and Navigation on the Sony Ericsson P1i
• Games and Applications on the Sony Ericsson P1i

Hidden in the top-left of the phone is the stylus pointer used for navigating the Symbian powered touch system, an alternative approach for right handers is to grow out your right hand thumb and index finger nails, file them both to a point and leave your stylus in it’s bay! Works a treat and you’ll never lose your stylus.

In my experience the touch screen is highly responsive, the slightest tap is enough to open menus, alter fields or handwrite on. With a few hours practice you’ll find yourself scribbling e-mails, notes and daily SMS’s in handwriting mode rather than rocking on the QWERTY keyboard.

Rocker Keyboard

Writing on the keyboard as a first time QWERTY mobile user is a very foreign experience, my first 100 character SMS must have taken 10 minutes to type out, but with a bit of time this new method becomes very intuitive and there’s no going back. The P1i sports dual-function keys – each key has a left and right function to it – coined ‘rocker’ keys, an example is the 3 keys on the keyboard “QW ER TY”; 3 keys with 6 functions.

Packed within five columns and four rows of spaced keys are 35 unique key possibilities, this doesn’t include alternative keys or function keys available within the keyboard alone which boost it to a number I’m not going to count; there’s alot, is that suffice.

Games on the P1i (UIQ 3) are out of this world, powered by Java and OpenGL environments. I’ve got a port of Lemmings, OpenGL golf and a variety of free (OMG?!) visually stunning programs.

There’s also a library of productivity software available from instant messengers (Fring, IM+) to in-car navigators (Tom Tom). Watch those battery levels though, with great possibilities come great demands on your battery!

Updates

• 01/03/2008: I’ve moved all themes to Sony Ericsson P1i Themes (UIQ 3.1)
• 02/01/2008: Removing dead links, shifting themes to another page. Building library page for applications and themes.
• 17/11/2007: New files are up, I’m separating the free from the… err, not free. I’ll keep working on it, any suggestions?
• 06/11/2007: Okay so just saying there’s cool stuff for the P1i is like teasing a child with sweets, here’s my favourite sources for themes, games and UIQ 3 compatible software… it’s a growing list.

Free games

• Lemmings for UIQ 3
• ScummVM for UIQ 3

In response to visitor requests, solely for information and research purposes.

Software

Games

Simulator

• Sensible Soduku
• Transport Tycoon Deluxe

Fun

• Return to Mysterious Island
• Mau Mau

Emulator

• Gameboy Advance Emulator

Internet

• OperaMini v2.04
• AVG Mobile Security v1.22
• IM+ v3.72

Office

• Oxford Dictionaries
• Aqua Calender
• Best Password Manager v1.00

Multimedia

• DivX Player v0.89
• Location Free TV v1.0.0
• DivX Player v0.88
• HandyWeather
• Alon Audio Recorder
• Animated Stereogram

Contacts

• FTP BT v1.07 (Bluetooth hacking)
• Dream Connect
• Auto Hang Up v1.00
• Call Filter v0.06

Navigation

• Car Monitor

General

• Software pack (60mb)
• Linkboy Cellphonesoft
• Gdesk
• Slick v0.30
• Slick v0.21
• X-plore v1.05
• Abakus
• Ballroom v1.00
• Best Notes v1.00
• Capture Screen
• Clockss

Themes

If you’re looking for free theme sites for your Sony Ericsson P1i check out Sony Ericsson P1i Themes (UIQ 3.1)