Sony Ericsson today unveiled its next generation smartphone, the P990 flagship UMTS phone, which Sony Ericsson claimed it is the first commercially available smartphone to adopt the Symbian OS v9.1 and UIQ 3 software platform. The P990 will hit the market in Q1 2006, which is in the same timeframe with another Symbian OS V9.1 powered mobile phone, the Nokia 3250. So we here at Portable Gadgets are wondering will the P990 hit the market before the Nokia 3250?
The P990 measures 114×57 x 25 mm in dimensions and weighs 155 g. It is a Wi-Fi (802.11b) enabled smartphone, featuring a 2 Megapixel camera with autofocus and 24bit color depth, a large 2.8” QVGA (240×320) touch screen with 262K colors, Bluetooh, IrDA, UMTS and Triband GSM, video telephony, media player, FM/RDS radio, Opera v8.0 browser supporting frames and javascript, push email technology, office files viewers (Microsoft Excel, Word, Powerpoint and Adobe PDF), office files editors (Microsoft Word and Excel), speaker phone, Memory Stick Pro DUO slot for up to 4GB removable memory (64MB bundled), flight mode with option to turn Wi-FI on, SyncML synchronisation, support for Java ME platform, and a new hardware keyboard beneath the flip-down keypad which will come in four variants: QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY and Russian.
To ensure a large proportion of applications are available on the new Symbian and UIQ software platform when the P990 goes on sale, Sony Ericsson has decided to announce the smartphone well in advance of availability so that developers have time to create and certify as many applications as possible.
In a separate announcement today, Sony Ericsson Developer World and UIQ Technology outlined their plans to support UIQ 3 developers. Developers can program in C++ or Java™ to create powerful professional and personal productivity tools for the P990. The smartphone is based on Java Platform 3 (JP-3). It supports four new Java Specification Requests (JSR’s) including Web Services (JSR-172) and is the twentieth phone from Sony Ericsson supporting Mobile Java™ 3D, demonstrating the company’s leadership in this new technology. Standard Java™ applications can be run with either the flip-down keypad open or closed.
The Sony Ericsson P900 smartphone provides up to 5 hours talk time and up to 150 hours standby time. It will be released in three variants in Q1 2006:
- P990i Dual mode UMTS (2100MHz) – GPRS 900/1800/1900 for Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa
- P990c Dual mode UMTS (2100MHz) – GPRS 900/1800/1900 for Mainland China. Launch for mainland China dependant on availability of 3G services.
- The P990 will be available in 4 hardware keyboard variants: QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY and Russian
