Set to start shipping during Q1 2006, Sony Ericsson's 3G UMTS P990 smartphone is billed as the first commercially available smartphone to adopt the enhanced Symbian OS version 9.1 and UIQ 3 software platform... Set to start shipping during Q1 2006, Sony Ericsson's 3G UMTS P990 smartphone is billed as the first commercially available smartphone to adopt the enhanced Symbian OS version 9.1 and UIQ 3 software platform. It is Wi-Fi enabled, has a 2 megapixel camera with auto focus, and features a new hardware keyboard beneath the flip-down keypad.

Two variants will be commercially available in Q1 2006:

• P990i dual mode UMTS (2,100MHz) - GPRS 900/1800/1900 for Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Africa; and
• P990c dual mode UMTS (2100MHz) - GPRS 900/1800/1900 for Mainland China.

Availability of 3G services will determine the launch on mainland China. The P990 is said to offer UMTS benefits such as video calling, high-bandwidth multi-media downloads and the ability to browse the Internet with full HTML pages. These can be viewed in landscape on the new Opera 8 browser.

In addition, the P990 is prepared for push e-mail clients, enabling full e-mail access with attachments.There is a combination of UMTS and WLAN intended to improve the efficiency and flexibility of applications such as e-mail, browsing the Internet/Intranet and video telephony.

Other new features include automatic time zone change to the calendar diary and updated PC sync software with extended synchronisation possibilities. Four hardware keyboard variants are possible: QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY and Russian. Screen is 2.8? QVGA (240 x 320) touch screen with 262k colours.

More info:

• www.sonyericsson.com