Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Sony Ericsson P1i

We've had owners of Sony Ericsson phones connecting to the service for a while but they proved to be a stealthy group of users in that nobody had ever reported any problems to us. (I'm talking about the 'home grown' Sony Ericsson phones, not the line of Windows Mobile devices they make). Curiosity got the better of me and I went eBay fishing for a test device. After a few delays with shipping and then me being out the office, my 'unlocked' P1i finally arrived today. The P1i is no longer sold, but there are similar current devices such as the G502. Anyway, the P1i is now configured and syncing. Interestingly, although the Sony Ericsson phones run the same Symbian S60 OS as Nokia devices, they ship a completely different sync client, Roadsync from DataViz (incidentally, you can get this client for Nokia devices too if you want).



My phone already had the Exchange sync client installed but Sony Ericsson's support page implies that some devices might not come with it pre-installed. Configuration was easy and I'm happy to report that it synced just fine. That is, except for the fact that contact pictures did not show up on the device. We need to so some investigation to determine why that's happening.
I connected the phone with WiFi, rather than cell data service. It does push sync over WiFi, even when the device is 'turned off'. A nice surprise because not all devices do this (the iPhone does not for example).
The keyboard drove me completely nuts. There are three or four characters per key, and both a shift and alt keys. I was unable to deduce the relationship between them by experiment and had to resort to the on-screen keyboard. The side scroll-click-wheel worked quite well though. Better than a touch interface for one-handed use, I think.
The contact and calendar apps have a good feel to them, and an initial test suggests that unlike Nokia's calendar, all day events work properly. There doesn't seem to be support for folders in the e-mail sync client (other than the inbox, sent folder etc). The device has IMAP IDLE (push) support but unfortunately so far I haven't been able to get its IMAP client to work at all. It seemed to become severely challenged by my 3600+ message inbox so I haven't had a chance to compare push sync e-mail with IMAP IDLE.
Once the remaining testing we plan is completed, we'll be adding some configuration and device-specific information to the web site.

10 comments:

Peter E said...

I'm one of those "stealthy" users that have synced the Calendar on my P1i via Nuevasync (I'm currently not doing it though).

About the only thing I found that was troublesome was that some repeat-every-year events would turn up as "repeat every 365 day" (or 364 or 366 - I don't remember) events instead.

Makes it interresting when your birthdays start moving around :-)

David Boreham said...

Well that's pretty strange. I did check a couple of birthdays in my tests, and I think they were correct. I'll see if I can reproduce your symptoms.

Peter E said...

It might have been birthdays that already was on the P1i when I started the sync that got synced wrongly (turned into repeat-every-365-days).

A coworker had a similar problem though - but in his case it was using a Nokia E71.

He also saw the same issue, but also an issue with appointments being duplicated..

David Boreham said...

There were a few Nokia duping problems fixed in March. The device was generating dups that were subtly different from the original, such that our duplicate detector wasn't finding them.

sandYroot said...

Hi David,

We are happy to say that our SE G700 with Symbian UIQ3 does the sync with our multiple google calendar as well!!

We've been searching for options everywhere, but except for payed services all options seemed only for Windows mobiles or Symbian Nokia S60 users.

Hope you can now just help everyone using tags for the multiple calendars soon in the future :-)

Unknown said...

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Unknown said...

Hi there,

you finally never put the details for the P1i on the website...

I have a problem with it. The sync fails and it says

0x7371107 (ASDataManagerErrBadStatus) Sync fail!

any idea what that could be ?

Unknown said...

Ho.. It also say before: Exchange reported error 3

Might be this error that trigger the next one... As the sync fail, I guess then the status is lost.

Unknown said...

I'm also having getting this error and I wonder if it is related to the version of the activesync program in my P1i

suvatha said...

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