Sony Ericsson G900

Sony Ericsson G900 is a high-end Symbian based business smartphone with very versatile functions and touch navigation.

Introduction:
Sony Ericsson G900 is equipped with 2.4-inch touchscreen with 240×320 resolution and good direct sunlight legibility, 5 megapixel memory and plenty of features for businessmen. Unfortunately, it also has some glitches which may consistently disturb its users. The phone is very well designed, yet at the time of writing this review it has some software and usability problems.


Sony Ericsson G900 pros:
+ Wi-Fi support
+ Easy to use
+ Combination of touchscreen and hard keys works well
+ interface is very user friendly
+ Most frequently used applications are on the homescreen
+ Compact size
+ 5 megapixel camera
+ Business card reader
+ 160MB built-in memory

Sony Ericsson G900 cons:
- Outdated Web browser
- Low sound quality from the loudspeaker
- Uneasy and slow document viewing
- Tends to get slow when running many applications
- Poor battery life

The design:
Sony Ericsson G900 measures 106 x 49 x 13 mm and weighs 99 grams. The front of the phone you will find the high quality 2.4” touchscreen. The screen sensitivity and sunlight legibility are both just fine. Under the display is the 5-way D-pad which you can ascribe shortcuts to according to your own preferences. On the right side of the phone are the following controls: camera shortcut, key locking the display and keyboard, as well as the volume controls. Those controls feel somewhat cheap and may be inconvenient to use for people with bigger fingers. On the left side of the Sony Ericsson G900 you will find the charger connector, and the M2 memory card slot. At the back of the cell phone is the 5 megapixel lens, the loudspeaker grill and the LED flash. The flash is situated on the left side of the lens so it may give uneven lighting.

Performance:
Sony Ericsson G900 is perforce for making phone calls. The reception is very good, as is the voice volume. The phone runs on Symbian UIQ 3.0 so theoretically at least the software should work fine. However, some of the recently reviewed smartphones (such as the Samsung F480, or HTC Touch Diamond) seem a bit more skillful and/or faster. The Sony Ericsson G900 is easy to navigate thanks to the touchscreen and the comfortable D-Pad. Oftentimes the icons on the screen are quite big enough to enable using fingers so you will need the stylus only for more specific uses (such as handwriting). The interface in the Sony Ericsson G900 is very pleasant and what is quite important it is configurable. You can change the shortcuts visible at the bottom of the screen, the themes and, of course, the sounds.


As for the business software the Sony Ericsson G900 slightly disappoints. Sure it has the calendar, unit converter, calculator, countdown timer and alarm clock. However, the calculator lacks scientific option, the Quick Office works slow and has limited functionality. You can view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files (yet not those created with Office 2007) and you can view the PDFs too. The Excel and PowerPoint viewers are slow and you can only zoom Excel files according to the presets and not any %. Navigation through complex PDF files is difficult, not to mention that it is a way too slow. Yet, the thing that worked very well in Sony Ericsson G900, but not in some other phones is the business card reader. I think it is the first phone that had this function made usable.
Browsing the Internet with Sony Ericsson G900 is doable, yet it is not the best experience I have had with a cell phone. The phone uses Opera v8 but pages load slowly and even though you can view them in the landscape mode the 2.4-inch display is a bit too small for more elaborate pages.
The 5 megapixel camera is very user but the overall image quality is only satisfactory. The Sony Ericsson G900 is most certainly not suitable for recording videos. When it comes to listening to music I was also a bit disappointed. There are no equalizer presets, the loudspeaker is not so loud and the sound quality is average. On the top of that Sony Ericsson G900 has quite poor battery life.

Menus / ease of use:
As the Sony Ericsson G900 runs on Symbian it is a very configurable smartphone with many additional programs, themes and widgets on the Internet. However, this very unit is slow and has too many lags for comfortable use. Moreover, the lags appear only from time to time so you never know if it shows now or just the next time which is even more annoying than if they were regular. At least then you would know what to expect.


Key Sony Ericsson G900 features and specifications:
GENERAL
2G Network
GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network
UMTS 2100
DISPLAY
Type
TFT touchscreen, 256K colors
Size
240 x 320 pixels, 2.4 inches
- Wallpapers, screensavers
RINGTONES
Type
Polyphonic, MP3
Customization
Download
Vibration
Yes
MEMORY
Phonebook
Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records
Practically unlimited
Card slot
Memory Stick Micro (M2)
- 160 MB internal memory
DATA
GPRS
Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 - 48 kbps
HSCSD
No
EDGE
No
3G
Yes, 384 kbps
WLAN
Wi-Fi 802.11b/g
Bluetooth
Yes, v2.0 with A2DP
Infrared port
No
USB
Yes, v2.0
FEATURES
OS
Symbian OS, UIQ
Messaging
SMS, MMS, Email, Push Email, Instant Messaging
Browser
WAP 2.0/HTML (Opera), RSS reader
Games
Yes + downloadable, order now
Colors
Dark Red, Dark Brown
Camera
5 MP, 2592х1944 pixels, autofocus, image stabiliser, video, flash; secondary videocall camera
- Java MIDP 2.0
- FM radio with RDS
- MP3/AAC/MPEG4 player
- Handwriting recognition
- StickyNotes
- TrackID music recognition
- Business card scanner
- Picture editor/blogging
- Document reader/editor
- Organiser
- Stopwatch
- Built-in handsfree
- Voice memo/dial

Other recently reviewed Sony Ericsson cell phones:

Sony Ericsson C905, Sony Ericsson W350i Walkman, Sony Ericsson G502, Sony Ericsson W980, Sony Ericsson T700