I'm sure there are a lot of Reviews on the Sony Ericsson G900 out there in the Web by now. But these are typically from professional reviewers who spent a few hours with the device prior to writing down their thoughts about it. I'm writing this review after using the G900 heavily for a bit over a year now. I've "upgraded" (I'm writing this in quotes because from pure tech specs it's not really an upgrade) from my much-loathed Nokia N93 in June 2008, and since then I'm using my G900 for:
- Syncing with my PC / Microsoft Outlook 2007 to have about 100 contacts and my calendar incl. meeting rooms and meeting text that contains dial-in numbers.
- Playing backgammon with the amazing BGBlitz.
- Many short calls, some long (1-2h) calls with phone / headset.
- Taking a few photos, using the music player and the radio.
- Surfing the web via WLAN (unsucessfully).
- Installing the latest (and unfortunately final) OS update.
- And a few exotic things like creating an Excel sheet on the phone, transferring it to my Mac via Bluetooth.
The Basics: Sending and Receiving Calls, Contact Management, Appointments
The basics of a mobile phone (at least one used for business purposes) are, obviously, calling, knowing who to call, and having an overview of your daily meetings. The G900 handles these tasks quite well (and unlike my N93, it didn't shut down all the time).
Installing Sony Ericssons Sync Software on a PC (Vista) works smooth, the initial sync runs smooth as well, and slow - shockingly slow, in fact. Plan an hour of time for it unless you only know two people and have one meeting a year. Later, syncing the changes in my calender takes about 5 minutes and runs in the background without requiring much attention, so apart from wondering what my PC and mobile phone are doing with all that time, it's a minor nuisance. The only complication is that I have to check the sync log after each sync to find out if my mobile phone has run Amok again (happened 3 times so far) and created duplicate appointments on my PC without reason, and deleting them again on the PC. But this seems to be a common kind of hickup on many mobile phones and PDAs.
Please note that there is no (ZERO) sync software available for the Mac. All you can do is transfer files.
Once everything is set up and synced, you can take a look at your calendar which is only one convenient click away. All appointments are synced with date, time, full location, full list of participants (except for th organizer), and the full message body except for attachments. Excellent! The calendar has all the typical features like adding appointments, switching between day/week/month view and so on. The only minor quibble I've got about it is that you can't really see ow much time which appointments take up and which time is free. If you have a two hour meeting at 10 am, the calendar will show "meeting (10:00 - 12:00)" at 10 pm and then show a couple of empty lines until noon instead of drawing a two-hour rectangle around the calender (like outlook does). This makes it a bit tricky to find out how exactly I'm going to spend the next hours.
All contacts are sycned even with their contact image, so if you've added images to your contacts in Outlook, you'll see their face when they call you. Even nicer!
Calling, well, works. Battery life is okay, reception and sound quality are good, the speaker doesn't work so well, the headset does. One big gripe: without the headset, the phone gets very warm after about 20 minutes of talking; after an hour the phone is real hot. This shouldn't happen. With the headset I've not noticed this effect, though. And in real life you want to use your headset for long calls.
Overall, the G900 does a good job in this department. The amount of data synced with an appointment is the highlight here, the phone getting hot in long calls its biggest issue.
Playing Backgammon (and other games)
I have to confess I'm playing Backgammon against the mighty BGBlitz in every free minute. All that is needed to use BGBlitz is a reasonably fast processor + Java implementation. The G900 delivers a solid performance here; also more CPU-challenging games should run fine. But don't dare to compare it to Nokia's powerhouses - my N93 beats the G900 by a factor of 3-4 in terms of pure Java performance.
Touchscreen is supported.
Photos, Music, Videos
First, I've not taken a single video with my G900 so far so I can't comment on this category. Camera: Sony Ericsson brags with 5 megapixel. 2 good megapixels would have been better. But as it is, even my first "Canon Digital Ixus (US: Powershot S100)" with a whooping 2 megapixels, released back then in 2000, delivers much clearer, sharper, better images than the G900. So this is a crap camera, just like the N93's camera was crap, and probably every other mobile phone camera is crap. When will somebody finally come up with a phone with a camera that's actually usable? I don't ask for much. Make it as good as a 9 year old low-end consumer cam. That should be possible, right?
But yes, you can take pictures, and if you take a shot of somebody, chances are you'll recognize him/her on the jpeg. Sometimes you have to photoshop a bit because the image has a strong blue tint, and the "click on the touchscreen where you want the focus" feature is nice but fairly useless. It's a camera. Sort of.
Music is implemented well. The media player plays MP3s and DRM-free AAC files, and other than the N93 (which only could play one AAC at a time) it does that really well. The music player is a fine piece of engineering with lots of good functions (like listing the next random songs if you want, selection by all MP3 tags, nice integration into the "standby application" (the screen you see when no other app is running), good background playback. You can't do that much better.
The same holds for the radio - it shows a sorted list of available stations, has all the normal functions, and you even can place not only a radio shortcut on your standby app, but even a shortcut for a certain station.
Surfing the Web (via WLAN)
So far I've not been able to connect to my Apple Airport Extreme WLAN with my G900. My Mac: no problem, my PC: no problem, my PS3: no problem, even my PSP: absolutely no problem, my N93: no problem. But my G900 performs incredibly poorly, hangs all the time, sometimes so deep in the system that I have to remove the batteries. Shit software (and yes I do have the latest firmware).
Installing the latest firmware
A symbian phone like the G900 is a complicated thing, more like a computer than like a phone. Thus it's important that you can get access to the latest firmware with the latest bugfixes. I did that for my G900, and the whole process worked like a dream. Good job, Sony Ericsson.
Too bad that S.E. has canned the G900's UIQ Symbian team so the G900 is now discontinued already. You shouldn't let this disturb you too much, but it's annoying. There still are bugs in this phone, the performance might be better, but this won't be addressed. Ever.
Exotic Things
The G900 can do a number of nice things: it can let you edit Powerpoint slides (VERY crummy), and excel sheets (very convenient and good to use), and of course word texts (okay). You can transfer those later to your Mac or PC via Bluetooth or by syncing. You can also view PDF files in a fairly good, albeit slow viewer. And you can do a billion other things like currency conversions, use your phone as a flashlight, voice recording, ...
General Impression / Usability
The G900's UIQ Symbian operating system is a fine system that does the usual things (run a couple of applications at the same time, allowing to switch between them, show stuff on the screen) really well. REALLY well. The menu system is well organized - I'm sure the G900 has as many features as the N93 had, but I actually find them. :-) And the touchscreen really makes life much easier (see my other post about that).
Build quality is good; my G900 has survived its share of being dropped without a problem (again: unlike my N93). And the ratio "features / volume" is amazing. If you want a lot of functionality, but don't want to drag around a huge bulk, this is the phone to get.
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