The G900 and its sibling, G700, represent a new kind of Sony Ericsson smart phone products, that don’t look or feel like a smart phone, yet perform and deliver as one would expect a smart phone to do. These G’s are targeted at the normal everyday consumer, who wants a little extra something from his phone, while still keeping the price low. Both phones can be used almost solely without the use of a stylus, separating them from Sony Ericsson’s previous smart phones. In a very good way, that is.
The G700 and G900 will sell like hot cakes, and in this review, we’ll be focusing on the right-out-of-the-oven hot G900, with a few additional features, such as a better camera and wireless LAN (W-LAN), when compared to the cheaper G700.
Official product pictures of the Sony Ericsson G900
Advantages
UMTS, WLAN 802.11b/g, and USB 2.0
Bluetooth 2.0 + A2DP
Stylish dark brown or red design
Small, thin and light for a smart phone
Bright 2.4 inch large transreflective touch screen with nice colours
Very easy to use
Visually improved user interface
Easy-to-use standby panels
Quick and beautiful Media application
Fastest UIQ device so far
Lots of 3rd party applications available for UIQ
5 mega pixel camera with touch auto focus and flash
‘Bang for the buck’!
Disadvantages
No HSDPA, or even EDGE
Network reception strength is only mediocre
No built-in GPS
Somewhat slow Bluetooth transfer speeds
No memory card comes bundled
No physical soft keys like on G700
Minor software bugs
Tends to get slow when running many applications
Mediocre battery life
Being a smart phone, it’s only fair to compare it to another smart phone. That, however, is nearly impossible, as the Sony Ericsson G700 is the only smart phone similar to the G900. The fact is that there are currently no direct competitors to either of these phones, considering their feature set, price and marketing segment. We are sure to see more phones like these from Sony Ericsson, however, and I don’t doubt other manufacturers will follow as well.
The G900 comes in a grey sales package, reasonably sized for this phone. Apart from the G900 and a battery for it, the box contains a charger, a wired headset (HPM-62), USB cable (DCU-65), an extra stylus, lots of manuals and sales content, as well as a software CD. You’d think there’d be more to it than that, but no, that’s actually all there is in the rather large box. It’s a pity they haven’t included a desk stand or even a memory card. My guess is that this was to keep the costs low. You can find our G900 picture unboxing here, and a video unboxing just below.
Visually pleasing
The G900 is a relatively normal sized candybar phone with rounded edges and glossy plastic parts. Its large 2.4 inch TFT display is well-saturated and quite bright, although it fails to impress outside in sunlight. The display is not only large for a phone in this segment, it’s also touch sensitive, although some will argue it’s too small for a touch screen. Personally, I didn’t experience any problems with its size, as you’ll rarely need to use the display, and when you do, the display size isn’t limiting in any way.
The G900 measures 106 x 49 x 13 millimetres making it a very small smart phone. In addition to that, its weight is below the magical 100 grams, scaling in at just 99 grams, which is very impressive. G900 is available in two colours - Dark Brown & Dark Red.
Based on photos of the G900, you’ll probably think the keypad isn’t that nice to use. This is not the case, though. The keypad is actually quite easy to use, and it gives a good tactile feedback. Although I would have loved a tiny bit more space between the keys, it’s not much of a problem for me, and only the fewest people will find themselves in trouble with the keypad.
The backside of G900 is - in my opinion - one of its weaknesses. The material used is simply a bit too slippery for me, and I would have loved to see something more rubberised and maybe even rippled like on G700, as that feels really nice. Also, the top part of the back, where the camera is located, is made of glossy plastic that is very liked to get scratched fairly quickly.
On the left side we’ve got a FastPort connector, a status LED, the stylus, as well as a Memory Stick Micro (M2) card slot hidden behind the battery cover. The right side sports volume/zoom controls, a quick keypad lock key as well as a camera shutter key.
Nothing is located at the bottom of the phone, and only the power button is at the top of the phone.
The battery in G900 is a standard BST-33 battery (950 mAh). Official claims are that it’ll supply enough juice to keep the G900 running in up to 380 hours of standby or 12 hours of talk on GSM networks. Personally, I feel this is set a bit too high. I’m not getting more than 2 - 3 days of normal use out of G900 - that should at least have been 3 - 4 days if the official statements were correct.
Hot, funky & re-organized
The G900 is powered by a 208 MHz ARM9 CPU and a work memory of 128 megabytes of RAM. While the CPU isn’t exactly top-class, the amount of RAM memory is excellent, and it’s virtually impossible to run out of RAM memory, unless you’re really trying hard, and have opened a good fifty applications or so at the same time. Personally, I’ve got about 25 applications running in the background now, and the phone is still quite snappy, although it’s slightly worse than with only a few running in the background.
The G900 is based on the Symbian OS (Operating System) 9.1 with the UIQ 3.0 user interface running above the Symbian kernel. Normally this would mean a graphically not so interesting user interface, and - for most people - an interface that’s hard to use. Sony Ericsson has changed that stereotype with the G700 & G900, making the user interface easy to use for everyone. It looks like they’ve really worked on the usability this time, making sure icons were big & easy to use. They’ve also totally re-organized the interface by hiding a few of the most geeky features, and making it easier to access settings, entertainment applications and alike.
To prove to myself that I’m not just making all of this up, and that the changes are more than just superficial, I asked both my non-technical mother and a non-technical friend of mine to try it out, and find certain applications, settings and alike. Both were able to use it without any further instructions from me, and my mother even said it’s a lot different than the others using the operating system, when I told her it’s the same operating system as in the P1 - a phone she had an extremely hard time using. My friend liked it so much, he ended up buying one. In conclusion to that, I think it’s fairly certain to say that there’s been some major changes in the operating system, user interface and generally on how you use the phone on a daily basis.
The first thing you’ll notice when turning on the G900 for the very first time is the standby panels, as shown in the screenshots above. These are highly customizable panels you can easily browse through with the navigation D-pad. The idea is just genius, and it works extremely well. You can set up to 11 active standby panels, including shortcuts, favourite contacts, tasks, calendar appointments, RSS feeds, music player and alarms. I’ve really gotten used to using the panels, and I’m hoping application developers will be able to add more panels in the future, or that Sony Ericsson eventually will add more. If you don’t like the active standby panels, you can change the standby application (yes, that’s the name of it) to either the business one, seen on P1 and W960, or simply no standby application at all, which makes it look more like a regular phone.
The menus have been optimized a bit. Instead of the old icons, they’re now almost all glossy candy blue-coloured icons. Being that these are not business phones, I don’t have any problems with it, and I did think the old ones needed a facelift, and this one seems like a good one. They’re definitely quite funky.
As always, you’ve got a selection of two menu view types - a grid view and a list view. I personally prefer the grid view, and it’s also more finger-friendly, if that’s what you’re looking for.
You can create new folders and sort applications according to what you want. This is good, as all third party applications are being placed in the ‘Entertainment’-folder, which isn’t exactly suitable for office applications or anything work related.
Another rather drastic change involves the task manager. On previous UIQ 3 phones, the task manager provided you with details about recently opened application, currently open applications, how much RAM they used, an option to end all running applications, and even a few short cuts. The task manager - now known as “Open applications” - has been drastically stripped down, and now only includes a list of open applications and the ability to end or switch between them. It’s obvious that Sony Ericsson made this change to get rid of the more geeky task manager, although it was ahead of the competitors’ offerings - now it’s just on par with them. In my eyes, this is more of a step backwards, although it’s easier for first time users to use now, which was generally the point of making the user interface more user friendly.
While a lot of things have changed, there are still bits and parts of the user interface that have not undergone any sort of plastic surgery. It’s unfortunately still possible to find small icons in the user interface that act as short cuts to various actions - these are just about impossible to finger with your finger if you’re in a rush. These icons are generally the status icons on the status bar at the very top of the phone’s display.
Another thing that has not been improved is the call logs. It’s still a bit boring looking, and it could easily be made more finger friendly, and even get its features extended a bit, such as including single call length logs, which is currently not unavailable.
Generally, the G900 software has been quite stable. I’ve experienced a few freezes while loading the Media application while running lots of applications in the background, and also a few very minor software bugs. It surprises me that these bugs are present, as they’re quite obvious - i.e. one of them is that the display doesn’t clear when you’ve locked the keypad using the keypad combination, and not the keypad lock key on the right side of the phone. Apart from that, I haven’t experienced anything unusual about the software in G900, which is good.
Handy notes and organizer
The Notes application on the G700 and G900 smart phones is - somewhat surprisingly - one of the selling points, hence the dedicated short cut key to the Notes application. Had these two phones been no different than the previous UIQ 3 phones, I would have had to bash Sony Ericsson for marketing the phones on the Notes application, as it was far from excellent. Graphically it was pretty horrible, and it lacked a few features, such as an alarm feature, which has now been added. I do however miss the ability to change the colour of your drawing pen - this was possible in older phones.
The built-in calendar seems quite good, and I find it more than sufficient to my needs. Among its features are different view modes, calendar synchronization (with PC Suite and Exchange ActiveSync), search functionality, advanced calendar entries - four different types; appointments, reminders, all day events, and anniversaries. The Tasks application makes it possible for you to set different tasks with dates & alarm for yourself, prioritize them, and add further notes if needed. It’s quite a useful application if you’ve got a lot of things on your to-do list, like I often do.
The file manager is really good. You can manage all accessible files on your phone memory and memory card, and perform various operations such as creating folders, renaming files and folders, copying and moving files/folders. You can view file properties, space available, use the built-in storage wizard to remove old files, etc., and even install and uninstall applications from the file manager. Basically, I think this is one of - if not - the best file managers in smart phones.
The Converter application is quite a capable fella’. It can convert distances, volumes, weights, temperatures, speeds, areas and currencies (you can manually update the currency exchange rates). All in all, it works quite well.
The Timer application is a tiny application to set a time for the phone to count down to. It can continue counting in the background, as long as you don’t close the application. There’s also a stopwatch application, which explains itself, I guess, with support for multiple laps. This application is also capable of running in the background.
The built-in Calculator application isn’t too spectacular. You can do a set of normal calculations, including memory functionality, and that’s about it. I’m missing more scientific features.
The G700 and G900 phones are the first with a standard UIQ flash light application like ‘normal’ Sony Ericsson feature phones. The flash light application can be set to flash as an SOS signal, on for 1 minute, on, and off.
Quickoffice 4 is bundled on the G700 and G900. It’s a rather nifty office application that handles Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, and is capable of editing these as well, with some fairly advanced formatting features, including inserting pictures, considering it’s an application for a mobile phone. The application is easy to use, and has been greatly improved compared to version 3 that was bundled with previous UIQ smart phones by Sony Ericsson.
Pdf+ is the bundled PDF reader in G700 and G900. It’s a rather decent PDF reader, and it gets the job done quite easily. like with office documents, you can simply press a PDF document in the file manager, and Pdf+ will automatically start up and open just that document. Pdf+ features decent functionality, although it’s a tad slow from time to time - most likely because of the now rather old processor in the phone.
The business card reader is a genius application if you need it. You simply snap a picture of a business card, and the phone’s OCR software makes out the text, and automatically creates a new contact with the information found on the business card as well as a photo. It works really well, just make sure you’ve got plenty of light for the camera to get all the details in on the picture.
Touch my auto focus
The G900 sports a decent 5 mega pixel camera on the back. It’s a CMOS sensor with auto focus - with a hint. The auto focus can not only be used in the regular way, it can also be used by simply touching the area you want in focus on the display, and the phone will automatically focus on that area in particular. It’s a nice feature, and it generally works quite well, although it’s hardly something you’ll end up using a lot on a daily basis, as it takes more time to compose a photo that way. Apart from that, there’s also a powerful LED flash on the back of the G900.
The camera interface has really been lifted up a notch compared to the older solution. Everything is now accessible by using your finger only, and the menus are nicely animated with fly-out menus. Sony Ericsson has gone for a higher usability on this one as well, actually creating two settings menus. The first one holds four large icons (Scenes, Shoot mode, Flash & Focus) - these are most likely to be the settings you’ll be using the most, which is why they’re featured there. If you wish to alter the more advanced features, this can be done by first pressing the Settings icon, and then pressing it again when the basic settings have appeared. This will bring up a list of more advanced settings. In total you’ll be presented with these settings;
Without further ado, here are some photo samples, all shot in auto mode. Press the thumbnails for full size views.
I believe it’s fair to say that these photos are quite decent in terms of quality. The camera generally picks up most details, although you’ll lose some as well no matter what you do. The G900 isn’t exactly great at taking pictures of just slightly dark subjects - unless you want excessive amounts of image noise, that is. Just have a look at the photo of the camera - the room was well-lit, but because the camera is black, the G900 didn’t cope with it very well, resulting in black areas with high levels of noise. Even outdoor photos in sunlight can get rather noisy, although there’s a smaller chance of it happening than indoors.
Anyway, there’s more to good pictures than image noise handling. One thing is the quality - sharpness and the amount of details the photo will end up with. Generally, the G900 delivers some nice, reasonably sharp quality shots, though with a somewhat variable level of details. Sometimes you’ll get lots of details in a photo, while it may deliver the exact opposite only moments later. This really isn’t one of its best sides, and I hope Sony Ericsson will somehow get this fixed in a firmware update.
The last thing to make a good camera is the colour output - this is an area where Sony Ericsson is just about spot-on perfect with the G900. The colours are realistic and natural, although sometimes a tiny bit over-exposed. From time to time, you’ll also notice purple colour fringing, which isn’t exactly that nice to look at, although it can luckily be removed, if you know your way round a good photo-editor.
Video clips can be recorded on the G900 as well. You can record clips in up to QVGA size (320 x 240 pixels) with up to 15 frams per second, and a video bitrate of about 350 Kbps. The quality is just about average, and the codec used (H.263) is not the best solution out there. It’s a pity the framerate isn’t a bit higher, as videos recorded using 15 frames per second often look a bit choppy when played. You can check out a small video capture sample below (QuickTime required) or download it here (right click and save the file).
The Media application handles all the photos and videos on the phone, as well as music files - read more about the latter in the next section. For photos and videos it really does an excellent job, and is without doubt the best media manager on any smart phone. The rather slow CPU in the G900 does have a few limitations though, and it’s far from as quick and smooth as you’d have wished for it to be. It is especially rather slow when browsing through full 5 mega pixel photos in full view mode, where it can take up to several seconds for it to reload the next photo. In the thumbnail overview mode, though, everything is smooth and speedy. The photo viewer comes with a bunch of features, such as zooming, photo tags and really cool slide shows, and its nice on-screen controls will easily let you navigate through the photos. Everything can be flipped to landscape mode, making photos look even prettier on the 2.4 inch display.
The video part of the Media application works almost as well as the photo part. The application will allow you to access your video files and recorded video clips in one folder called ‘Videos’, while podcast video episodes can be found in a folder called ‘Podcasts’. Really rather simple, and the simple and effective layout makes it easy to find your videos. While playing a video, you’ve got the same nice, big video controls on the display making it easy to go to the next video or even do a bit of fast-forwarding. Both the photo and video on-screen controls disappear after a few seconds if you don’t use them. Tap the display once, and they’re back, if you need them.
Jukebox extraordinaire
The built-in music player is quite good, although not as feature packed as that in the Sony Ericsson W960, although the look is somewhat similar. like the W960, the G900 is capable of playing most normal audio codecs, including the lovely eAAC+ codec for almost lossless audio at very low audio bit rates.
The music player is nicely set up, and it is easy to find just what you’re looking for, whether it’s a certain album, a special song or even an auto play list of 80’s hits. It’s all up to you. The G900 sorts your music in an endless amount of ways, including artists, albums, tracks, compilations, audio books and podcasts - even recordings! There’s not a chance of you not finding what you were looking for, unless it’s not on the phone, of course.
I tested the audio quality with the Sony Ericsson HPM-83 headset, and found it being very good. It was more than loud enough for me, and it was nice and with a good bass, too. Soft tunes sounded how they were meant to sound, although deeper and more harsh tunes were a bit distorted. If you’re fitted with a normal set of ears, odds are you won’t find this is a problem. Even so, if you are thinking this is a problem, the built-in 11-band equalizer should help you a bit.
The G900 also comes with a built-in FM radio with RDS support. The radio works really well, and its reception strength is quite good, too. The radio user interface is really nice, easy to use, and easily sets the standard for others to follow.
The G900 can automatically store up to 20 FM radio channels (frequencies), and each can be presented by name, song playing, etc., if the radio channels support RDS. What’s more is that the RDS in G900 not only automatically finds a better radio frequency, if the signal isn’t that good, it’s also capable of interrupting radio shows to give you traffic and news announcements, which is a really nice feature.
TrackID is supported by the G900, so you can make it record a short sample of a song playing in the radio or elsewhere, and have it send it off to Gracenote’s huge database, coming back only seconds later with full details about the song, and possibly also a link to a mobile music shop where you can buy the song in question. TrackID is simply a genius application, and it works a treat!
Gaming and fun
A Java-powered sudoku game by Digital Chocolate is the only pre-installed game in the G900. I don’t understand why there’s only one pre-installed game, when other business UIQ phones have more, better and native games pre-installed. When it comes down to it, though, the sudoku is rather nice, although the initial loading time takes almost 15 seconds! The touch screen capabilities are fully supported during the game, so you don’t have to use the keypad, if you don’t want to.
MusicDJ is Sony Ericsson’s tiny music application for creating your own tunes and beats. You can choose from 56 samples for each of the four instruments, which really isn’t bad. You can save your melodies once you’re done, and use them as ringtones, message tones, etc.
PlayNow is Sony Ericsson’s online content shop, where you can find songs, themes, wallpapers, games, applications, etc. Unfortunately, the G900 isn’t that very well supported at the moment, and it’ll probably take some time before you can use PlayNow on the G900 for more than the music shop.
Great W-LAN, not so great 3G
I hate to say this, but Sony Ericsson have made me do it, by not including HSDPA. Well, there - I said it! The G900 does not support HSDPA networks, so you’re limited to the slow 3G network speeds (up to 384 Kbps). You’re in luck, though, if you’re within reach of a W-LAN network, where you can make use of the built-in W-LAN up to 54 Mpbs (802.11b/g).
G900 supports Bluetooth 2.0 with speeds up to about 70 KB/s. The A2DP profile for stereo music streaming is also available. A cabled connection would be via USB - the G900 tops at just about 2 MB/s in file transfer mode (USB mass storage).
The built-in web browser is Opera Mobile 8.65, which in itself is fairly good. We have, however, got reasons to strongly believe it will be upgraded to Opera Mobile 9.5 with Flash Lite 3 support in the next firmware update, so look out for that one!
While there’s not really any news in Opera Mobile 8.65 compared to the one in i.e. P1 and W960, it has been optimized a bit for using it with the keypad only. You can change between tabs with the keypad, and there are nice short cuts available, although these were also present on other phones.
Websites can be displayed in either a fitted version or a full size version - both in either portrait or landscape mode. If you’re browsing a website where you can log in with an account, the browser can save this user name and password for you, allowing you to do the log in process much faster when you visit the same website in the future. It is, however, limited to only one saved account per website.
Download speeds are nice, and the browser supports light Java scripts with future support for Flash elements.
If you’re visiting a website with an RSS feed - such as this one - the browser will show a small RSS icon near the website tab - press it once, and the RSS feed has been added to the phone’s built-in RSS reader. The built-in reader is quite good, although it seems there’s no support for inline images.
The e-mail client is built right into the Messaging application. It is easy to set up your account, either following a guide or doing it manually. G900 supports push emails, and can be set to automatically check for new emails each hour or whatever you set it to.
HTML-formatted emails are shown as they’re supposed to look, and it supports large attachments, too, if you’re not too worried about your data traffic or you’re using a W-LAN connection. If you are, however, worried about the data costs, you can limit the G900 to only downloading a certain amount of e-mails, headers or even set a data limit.
Blue contacts
The phone book is one of the great things about the G900. It’s really good, and you can store details about almost anything on each contact in it. If the option isn’t there, you can just add the information in the contact’s note. You can also add a photo to your contacts, special tunes, etc. They’ve really thought about everything.
You can save up to 2,000 contacts, which should be enough for most.
Speed contacts is a nice addition as well. In here you can set up a list of your nine favourite contacts for easy access.
Messaging works a treat
Both MMS and SMS text messages are supported by the G900 handset. The MMS size limit is at 100 kilobytes, and the SMS message limit is about 1600 characters. The SMS storage depends on your phone memory, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone to keep more than a thousand messages. More than that is likely to slow down the phone quite a bit.
In addition to the SMS support, the G900 also features EMS support, so you can include graphical smilies, melodies, pictures, etc. in your SMS messages. It’s a nice twist, and makes it a bit more of a joy to read SMS messages.
You can use either the keypad for typing in words (multi-tap or T9) or you can use the touch screen with its handwriting recognition or even the on-screen QWERTY keyboard. The handwriting recognition works very well once you’ve got the hang of it.
Low on network reception
Although the G900 isn’t that great when it comes to network reception, I haven’t experienced any missed calls due to this. I’ve experienced very low reception strengths at times, but not bad enough to miss any calls.
Speaking of calls, the G900 is quite good. The volume is more than satisfactory, and the sound quality is very high as well. I haven’t tried out video calls on the G900, although it does support video calls. Who uses it, anyway?
The call manager holds a total of up to 30 calls. It’s not really finger friendly, but is still pretty good.
Conclusion
Sony Ericsson promises the G900 will change the way consumers think of smart phones. I think they’re right. Sony Ericsson really upped its game with the release of the G700 and G900 phones, and they’ve been greatly improved in both specifications and usability compared to previous Sony Ericsson smart phones.
Another important factor, that will bring along lots of buyers, is the extremely low price. The G900 retails at about £250, which is a bargain for a phone like this! It has no direct competitors being it’s this cheap with such a feature set, making it a really good purchase.
The battery life is just OK, without really being impressive. I had hoped for a little more juice, but I’m guessing the small size is the limiting factor when choosing the battery to go with the phone.
I can easily recommend the G900 to business men, everyday consumers - heck, even first time buyers! The G900 is really versatile, and it is in my opinion one of Sony Ericsson’s finest offerings as of yet.
(10 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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