A
review of the SonyEricsson P910a's ability to surf
the internet
By
George H. Wells, Jr.
January
5, 2005
Since
this is a review of the SonyEricsson P910a's ability
to surf the internet, I won't be covering the multitude
of other features that are covered elsewhere.
The
background:
I
really didn't need a PDA device since I have a lightweight
laptop (Compaq Evo N400c) which, of course, can go
anywhere on the net.
But after obtaining a PDA, the HP iPAQ 4355, I decided
to use it for some of the more portable applications
such as streaming audio and monitoring stocks. This
PDA does not have a phone built-in but it does have
both Bluetooth and WiFi capability. At home or anywhere
there is a hotspot available, I use the broadband
WiFi. Otherwise, I use Bluetooth to connect to my
SonyEricsson T39m cell phone to dial up Tmobile's
unlimited data connect service which costs exactly
$30.88 per month. I signed up for this service through
Dr. Wireless. Unfortunately, there are many websites
that will not work with this PDA, I presume because
it does not understand Java or Java script, neither
of which I understand. It will stream some audio sites
but not all and it will not stream stock charts in
real time because they use Java.
After
reading about the SonyEricsson P910a on the web and
how it understands Java (or is it Java script?), I
asked Dr. Wireless if I could purchase one on condition
that it would solve the problems I was having with
my PDA. He wholeheartedly agreed but I had to wait
until one became available because they sell immediately.
Poor Dr. Wireless doesn't even have one for himself
yet. He let me have the one that was going to be his!
Now that is unselfish service.
Fortunately I got it just before the holidays when
I planned on taking time off from work and, as it
turned out, I needed every minute of that time to
research it.
The
Bad:
The
bottom line is that it didn't solve either of my problems
and, in fact, was worse than the PDA. After two weeks
of fussing with it and posting and searching on esato.com
(an independent site for SonyEricsson phones) I have
finally concluded that for all practical purposes,
the P910a cannot stream anything, at least I have
not been able to find one example that works, not
one. Furthermore, during my quest to solve this problem
with the P910a, I learned that there are third party
applications that can be downloaded to my PDA to solve
some of its streaming audio problems. What more can
I say?
Now
on to the problems with streaming stock charts. I
have two on-line brokerage accounts, scottrade.com
and ameritrade.com. I started with the Scottrade service
because it had cheaper trades but when I discovered
that I could not sell stocks short without making
a phone call, I switched to Ameritrade. Fortunately,
Scottrade has no minimum balance required to keep
your account active which means I can continue to
view their real-time charts even though I do trading
on Ameritrade. If I'm on my laptop, I do everything
from there with Ameritrade even if I'm using Bluetooth
to go online through Tmobile. However, if I am using
my PDA, I cannot view any stock charts on Ameritrade.
Many of the buttons don't work so it is pointless.
The PDA works quite well with Scottrade as long as
I don't use the streaming charts which use Java. This
means that I have to keep hitting some buttons on
the website to get it to redraw a chart every few
minutes or so. Again, I had high hopes that the P910a
would not only work as well as the PDA but would allow
streaming Java charts. Not so. Nothing works on the
P910a except the WAP versions of the stock brokers'
sites, but they even work on my T39m cell phone without
the PDA, so there is nothing to be gained here. The
P910a comes with a built-in browser for WAP and regular
sites. You can download Opera which is like a regular
browser in that it cannot display WAP sites. Opera
allows for multiple windows to remain open at the
same time (although you can only view one at a time
since every window on a PDA takes up all available
space on the screen). The user guide has the following
sentence which I find very amusing:
"The browser can open Web pages that use
Java script or frames, but functions that use Java
script in the Web page will not work properly."
--pg 77
For
the most part, you will always use Opera for normal
surfing since it is superior to the built-in browser
(except for WAP pages).
Specifically, when I try to login at ameritrade.com
with the built-in browser, it states that my browser
needs Java script in order to work. When I try to
login at scottrade.com with the built-in browser,
it simply hangs.However, I would have thought Opera
would be more successful. Not so. I can get to the
opening and login pages for scottrade.com but after
that I just get a page of html source code. With ameritrade.com,
I usually cannot get past the login page, but even
if I do, many of the buttons are unresponsive and
I cannot get to any stock charts. What more can I
say?
The
Good:
On
the positive side, the P910a has the best reception
of any of my cell phones. I have had enough experience
to know that the same model cell phone can vary from
unit to unit and they can change over time, so a sample
of one cannot promise that every other unit will be
just as good.
Also, it's interesting how the two displays take advantage
of the restricted screen real estate. The number of
pixels in the vertical direction is the same for the
two products, 320, but the P910a packs them into a
smaller space, 2.44 inches vs. 2.8 inches for the
PDA. In the horizontal direction, the P910a has only
208 pixels vs. the 240 for the PDA. Their respective
dimensions are 1.59 inches vs. 2.09 inches. Both devices
can display a website just like it would appear on
a larger screen with a single scroll bar on the right
and another one on the bottom so that you can view
any portion of the page. You can simulate this effect
on your laptop/desktop by making the window real small
and you will see how scrolling becomes a chore. This
mode makes it very difficult to read text that is
wider than the small screen because you have to constantly
scroll back on forth. So both devices also have a
"fit to screen" mode but this is where the
P910a has it all over the PDA. The PDA will compress
images and reformat text to take less width but it
does not rearrange the relative positions of the different
frames on the window. As such, you are often still
left with the requirement to scroll back and forth
while reading text. For example, msn.com in normal
mode is about 3.5 times the width of the screen and
4 times longer. In "fit to screen mode"
it is still twice the width of the screen and 6.5
times longer. You have to do an awful lot of scrolling
to make sure you don't miss anything on the page.
In contrast, the P910a will always find a way to reformat
the webpage so that there is no scrollbar at the bottom.
This makes it very easy to read text and to scan the
entire page with the one scrollbar on the right. It
does this by rearranging the positions of the frames
on the page. Frames that go across the page now go
down the page. You may not have any idea how the page
looks on a regular screen but all the content is there.
This could genuinely be called "fit to screen
width". And to top it off, the scrollbars on
the P910a are much narrower than the PDA which leaves
more room for the page. Furthermore, the P910a has
a button on the side that toggles all the menus and
toolbars on and off that appear above and below the
web page. In this mode, the P910a covers more area
than the PDA in the vertical direction and only slightly
less in the horizontal direction.
The
bottom line:
Clearly,
if you don't have an unlimited data connect service
then none of my comments apply to you. Surfing the
internet eats up the kilobytes real fast. Or if you
aren't interested in audio/video streaming or going
to secure financial websites, my comments won't apply.
But if you, like me, believed the advertising hype
or the user forum accolades, then it's time to "let
the buyer beware".
Acknowledgement:
I would like to thank Dr. Wireless for loaning me
a P910a so that I could evaluate it. Without him,
it would have been impossible since all the other
sources for this phone do not allow returns, including
SonyEricsson.
