Sony Ericsson stops firmware development on P990, W950, and M600 {Engadget Mobile}

Jun 27th 2007 5:55PM Strengths:
- WIFI,
- Video call,
- 2 Megapixels camera with LED,
- great design,
- 4GB external memory support
- excelent piece of hardware (I take my hat off).


Weekness:
After upgrading to the latest (and apparently the last) FirmWare:
- Customer Support really bad, will leave final users on our own if something fails.
- Memory leakage (depends on the use, but if you are a PDA-heavy-core-user, maybe you would
require to reset it once a day), or else applications would not start, or suddenly slow/stoppage
of the device will be experienced.
- If Speaker mode is used, a buzz is heard, so you would have to reset your call, or press
twice on the Speaker key
- On long emails the application may not work and even more it would crash
- Text files over 400k might not open, and any other open application at that time will close.
- If not a heavy user... then you might experience 1 restart per week "to improve performance"
- Multiple processing not reliable due to a poor memory handling
- Was designed with too little memory to say last (poor memory dimension).
- Randomly (not all times) the alarm buzzes whenever it pleases (or not)... so be prepared to
be late if someday morning the alarm does not buzzes.
- Cannot hold installed application icon's into selected folders, whenever the Memory Stick is
removed and inserted back.
- ..to mention some, plus more to discover.


Experience:
I have had this mobile for 5 months, it was not a cheap phone at all, but previous experiences
(P800, and P910) really well deserved it. At start up I realized this phone was not a stable...at
all! (WIFI could not handle a long time connection, many restarts per week, camera autofocus was
a crap!, etc), I had upgraded twice, and finally had the FirmWare (R6) that would solve most of
the problems.
Some bugs went away, and some new bugs appeared. Now SE decided to stop supporting this mobile
eventhough there are pretty obvious bugs.


Conclusion:
If you have a better option... then take it. Or else prepare yourself to keep your bugs for your own.
It is a shame that a high quality phone, has such poor support as SE is giving. It is supposed that
a high quality phone would have as minimum, a high quality software inside... but this was not the
case... and P990 FirmWare R6 is the base for the latest P1.

BEWARE!!!!