Review: Sony Ericsson G900

Another year, another mobile phone... Ok, I confess, the Nokia N93 was not the best purchase of my life. On one side, its power is still unbelievable. It runs Doom and BGBlitz (the best Backgammon you can get for mobile phones) blindingly fast (and its Java Benchmark results still keep amazing me). So why am I replacing it already? First, it is just too bloated. A monster. Second, it lets me do about a thousand things that I never find again in its weird menu system. And third, and most importantly, it keeps crashing on me, sometimes five times a day. It crashed on me when closing the lid or when twisting it to turn on the camera. It crashed while sitting in my jacket's bag, so I missed calls, it crashed and crashed and crashed.

Well, time to get another smartphone that is just released to the market to get me some more funny crashes :-).

After about a week of using my Sony Ericsson G900 I'm still much more impressed by the good aspects of this little beauty than I am annoyed by the bad ones.

So let's do the old "the good, the bad and the ugly":

THE GOOD

• The FM radio literally shocked me, so good it is. Worlds separate it from every other FM radio I've seen so far. It offers a beautiful UI, full RDS support, and is implemented in an extremely usable way. It's as if Apple would have done it, that's how good it is. When you start it first it will scan the frequency range and create a list of channels (with the real names), it will show you the current RDS text from your radio channel, and best of all it has an excellent reception too. Great. No, I would never have thought that I would end up praising the radio of a cell phone :-)
• The music player and photo viewer are done just as well. Here Sony's experience with the Walkman clearly shows. It builds up an internal index of all tracks by ID3 tags, so you can easily browse by artist or album; it makes good use of album artwork stored in the MP3s when viewing songs and albums, and offers a good sound quality even with the headset that is delivered with the phone. And viewing photos on the phone is a similarly pleasant experience.
  
• Good camera: this is what nearly prevented me from buying this phone - according to some tests, the camera's images are way overexposed, supposedly they are showing very strong noise. Well, they are, and they are not. This is a mobile phone, not a camera. This is clearly visible in its images. My first Canon Digital Ixus (2 MP) offered better images. But it's nowhere as bad as the evil sensor mess that my Nokia N93 was; The overexposure is there but can be corrected easily; the noise is (in my personal impression) about four times less strong than on the N93. I've not tried that, but I'm sure that with good noise reduction software and a bit of photoshopping you can actually turn the G900's photos to good, normal-sized prints and into beautiful backdrops for your PC.
  
• Excellent calendar / contact support: That was one of the reasons I went for a Symbian phone again: The calendar includes subject, location, and even participants and the full meeting text of every meeting. Great! Contacts also include all phone numbers, picture, address fields, ... - if it's in Outlook, it will be in your G900.
  
• Nice little usability touches (e.g. add an appointment to the calendar after a missed call)
• Good reception, good sound clarity. I've tried a few phones in my flat (where reception is real bad), the G900 is among the best here.
• Good menu system: I like Sony Ericsson's UIQ UI. It offers plenty of personalization features and a clean look and feel. Still, sometimes applications are stored in irritating folders (which you can change); e.g. the FM radio and the music player are in the most different places.
• Nice notes application: This is the best post-it notes application I've seen on a mobile phone (and as I always remember important TODOs when I do not have a PC or a piece of paper with me this comes in real handy).
• Design and build quality: Others call it bland, I like the very low-key, elegant design of this phone. Nothing obtrusive, nothing bragging. Very nice. But of course your mileage will vary. But the statement I can make is: it doesn't look or feel cheap.
  

THE BAD

• No normal headphone jack. Why does every mobile phone have to have its own standard of headsets, forcing you to use low-low-low quality headphones? Well, I'm sure that Ericsson does offer a more-expensive-than-you-think adapter that does this job.
  
• Syncing is slow. I'm using USB to sync my G900 with Outlook 2007. Unfortunately this takes a minute or so with every sync. My N93 (also Symbian based) synced ten times faster (my impression, not really measured) when syncing via IRDA!
• Post-Its are not synced properly. If they are handwritten (i.e. graphics) they are not synced with Outlook, and they are not stored as images or synced with whatever other tool. It's such a great application, so I just don't understand why Sony Ericsson has not at least written a small PC post-it application..
  
• Stores the alarm tone with the appointment. This doesn't sound grave, does it? But it is. Believe me. Promise me: if you buy this phone, IMMEDIATELY change the ring tones to what you like. And only then sync your appointments. I didn't. And had days of fun listening to this "oh, is that a tune from Starlight Express?" tune once an hour or so. But at least I learned to click away appointments real fast :-)
• Battery life could be longer. It could be shorter as well, but you don't charge the G900 once a week or even twice a month, you charge twice a week (with a fresh battery).
  

THE UGLY

• Regularly hangs when connecting to my Airport Extreme base station via WLAN.
• Data sync mode is instable when connected to a Mac. This is not fun when you sync a lot of songs or a huge offline Wikipedia to your mobile phone. Suddenly it hangs. Completely. Forcing a reboot.
• No profiles. I loved the capability of my N93 to let me assign a few people to a group "Important", and create a profile that kept all calls from anybody else silent.
  

Personally, I can live with the bad and the ugly, and I enjoy the good. And most of all I enjoy a phone that weighs below 100 grams and still has 90% of the cool features of those phones that weigh twice as much.