Features
The D900 packs as impressive a feature set as you're likely to find this side of a true smartphone. As such, it's a shame that its battery life is so disappointing. To be fair, there's only so much juice you can pack into a phone's battery while still keeping the entire package just over 1 cm thick. Still, when I had the D900 in my pocket, I wanted to take pictures, listen to music, read email, and play games -- all of which the handset is capable of doing in style. Unfortunately, anything more than sporadic use of these features (Camera and Bluetooth, in particular) meant that by nightfall I was starting to worry about my remaining battery life. Nightly charging of the D900 is basically a must, and anyone planning to use this handset as the multimedia machine it is should seriously consider keeping a fully charged spare battery in hand or at the office at all times.
Bluetooth implementation on the D900 supports A2DP, which means that a stereo Bluetooth headset can be used with the D900 (along with "standard" mono bluetooth headsets). This is a handy feature given the phone's music player, which supports mp3, and AAC/AAC/e-AAC file formats. While the music player's interface isn't quite as feature-laden as
Sony Ericsson's Walkman phones - the playlist and equalizer features in particular were a little lacking - it is fairly intuitive. The included stereo earbud headset produces pretty good sound for casual listening, but anyone set on using the D900 as their primary music player would do well to invest in a 3.5mm adapter for use with better headphones. Music files can be stored alongside other data either on the phone's 80mb of internal memory or a removable microSD card.
In addition to support for taking pictures and videos as mentioned earlier, the D900 also supports video playback of files encoded in MPEG-4 and H.263. Video playback was clear and generally stutter-free both from internal memory and a microSD card. An integrated document viewer allows for viewing of PDFs as well as Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents, which is handy for reading email attachments on the go.
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4.5
