Sony Ericsson P990

Sony Ericsson P990 is a smartphone and the successor of Sony Ericsson P910. The Free Ponsel uses the UIQ 3 software platform, which is based upon Symbian OS 9.1. It was released in August 2006. The P990 has a numeric keypad that flips open to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard below the display, on the phone itself. This is a change from P910 where the keyboard is on the flip. The flip itself can be attached or detached using the screw and screwdriver found in the box. The phone is a UMTS (3G) and tri-band GSM phone supporting video calls through its front VGA camera. The touchscreen displays 262,521 colours (18-bit colour depth) with a resolution of 240x320 pixels. It also comes with a 2.0 Megapixel camera featuring autofocus and an FM/RDS radio. The P990 runs the Nexperia PNX4008 ARM9 208 MHz processor from Philips.The screen despite a smaller length (2.8 inch) than its predecessors is actually larger in area because of the increased width. The phone also improves over the P910 by including support for Wi-Fi, allowing users to connect to 802.11b wireless networks. You can browse the Web using the built in Opera browser.

Connectivity has been an ongoing problem with the UIQ3 suite of phones from Sony Ericsson and the Mac OS X iSync utility that mac users use to synchronise the phone to the computer. As of February 2008 there are still widespread problems reported with these phones for Mac users.

P990 was the major smartphone device launched after P910. It had the latest UIQ user interface 3 which was completely incompatible with previous device applications. Like of P900 and P910 so new applications have to be written hence device did not have as many applications as older devices had. But the major issue was RAM which was much less (64MB) of which device used 48MB in start up (OS) and only 16MB was available for the user. This caused the phone to work slowly and crash frequently. Sony Ericsson later updated the firmware which made OS reduce its size up to 2MB and gave the user 17MB of memory to use. There were improvements seen in the phone after the software update.