Sony Ericsson
P910i

The P910 was an updated version of the Sony Ericsson P900 and had a very similar hardware design with the exception of the thumb keyboard on the inside of the flip cover which Sony Ericsson described as being “particularly useful for writing longer e-mails”. Other changes included support for Sony’s Memory Stick PRO Duo memory cards and the quadrupling of the internal memory from 16 MB to 64 MB. Compared to smartphones today, there was a lavish kit in the box which included a desktop charging and sync stand, 32MB memory stick, spare stylus and wired headset. There was also support for up to 1GB Memory Stick Duo Pro expandable memory. The phone was powered by the Symbian OS and the UIQ user interface which Sony Ericsson used across all its P-series smartphones. Eventually, Sony Ericsson purchased UIQ Technology in 2006 abandoning it in 2009 in favour of Windows Mobile and then Android. Sony Ericsson was very proud of the P910 being able to offer the “widest choice of input methods” which it claimed made “handling e-mails and web browsing a breeze” making the P910 “a must for mobile business professionals”. These input methods comprised handwriting via the stylus (using the Jot app to convert writing to text), a software keyboard and the thumb keyboard on the flip cover. There were five different keyboard variants offered comprising: Qwerty, Qwertz, Azerty, Russian and Greek. Another innovation on the phone was the introduction of a “five-way Jog Dial” which allowed users to scroll through the menus and content such as email as well as click forward, backwards and push-in to select. The jog dial had previously featured on early Sony phones such as the Sony CMD-C1 and the Sony CMD-Z1 Plus. In line with the desire to support business users, the P910 supported a wide range of email solutions with Smartner, IBM, Extended Systems, Visto, RIM BlackBerry, Seven and IntelliSync all offered. There was a VGA (0.3-megapixel) camera on the P910, but like the P900 which used the same camera module, it was very poor and was not able to capture particularly good images or video. There was no built-in GPS, and customers wanting navigation had to buy a separate Bluetooth GPS accessory. Three variants of the P910 were offered for different markets. P910i (as included in the Mobile Phone Museum collection) for the major GSM markets in particular Europe (900/1800/1900 MHz), P910C for China (900/1800/1900 MHz) and P910a for North and Latin America (850/1800/1900 MHz).