The phone and handheld functions are pretty much what you'd expect from such a high-end handset, and they include a calendar, a task list, a notepad, an easy-to-use speakerphone, vibrate mode, a calculator, an alarm clock, text and multimedia messaging, a sound recorder, and Quickword and Quicksheet for viewing and editing Word and Excel documents, respectively. The P910a ships with two games, Solitaire and Chess, which you can play against another P910a user via SMS. It also sports fairly robust audio and video player applications. The integrated MP3 player produces clean sound, and the process of moving files onto the player was much improved over the P900's. You can customize the smart phone with a variety of wallpaper, color themes, and sounds, and you can download additional applications from Sony Ericsson.
One of the P910a's best features is its ability to sync with IMAP4 mail servers using Smartner Duality Always-on Mail for corporate e-mail support of Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes. That said, however, depending on your corporate e-mail situation, getting this to work may be difficult. In other words, be prepared to enlist the help of your IT people. Comparatively speaking, getting access to corporate e-mail with devices such as the RIM BlackBerry 7750 is not only supereasy but can be done without the involvement of your IT team. Of course, the P910a also supports POP3 and SMTP e-mail and ships with a WAP 2.0 wireless Web browser that makes reading Web mail such as Yahoo and Hotmail a cinch. While the WAP browser is nice, it's often slow. This, as it turns out, was more of a minor pet peeve.
The P910a ships with only a VGA camera, which was a bit of a disappointment, considering the growing number of megapixel camera phones on the market. Features are very much like those of the P900. You can take pictures in 640x480, 320x240, or 160x120 resolutions and with outdoor, indoor, night, or auto settings. You also control the brightness and contrast, adjust the lighting (auto, fixed, indoor, outdoor, and fluorescent), use a backlighting option, or activate a shutter sound. We missed an optical zoom and a flash, but you get a mirror for self-portraits. You can store as many pictures as will fit on the P910a's memory, and a convenient counter keeps track of how much space you have left. When finished with your shots, you can save them as wallpaper, associate them with contacts, and send them to your friends. To channel your inner artist, the P910a also comes with a fun and handy image-editing application that supports multiple file formats. The camcorder records up to an hour of video with sound in MPEG-4 format (video length increases with Memory Stick); its file-editing options are similar to the camera's.
We tested the triband (GSM 850/1800/1900) Sony Ericsson P910a in the San Francisco Bay Area on T-Mobile's network, and the handheld worked like a charm. Callers noted that our calls were clear, and from our side, while those on the other end sounded a bit hollow, they were clear as well. The P910a has a built-in speakerphone that is activated simply by opening the flip once a call has been initiated. It also worked well, with admirable audio quality and volume. Since the P910a is a multimedia workhorse, it ships with stereo headphones that double as a wired headset. Sound quality hardly diminished, and we also were pleased with calls made with our Logitech Mobile Freedom Bluetooth headset.Battery life was excellent. Though we didn't reach the rated talk time of 13 hours, we still hit an outstanding 9 hours on a single charge. Standby time was also less than Sony Ericsson promised, but we still were pleased. We managed 10 days, compared with the rated time of 16 days. According to the FCC, the P910a has a digital SAR rating of 1.5 watts per kilogram.
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