2. Software

BenQ P30 is powered by Symbian OS version 7.0 and the latest UIQ version 2.1. This means that the device supports user inteface customization with Themes. Moreover, the P30 also provides full support for Profiles. There are 5 fully customizable profiles: Normal, Outdoors, Meeting, Home and Handsfree but there is no possibility of creating new ones. Profiles are superior to Themes and Appearances, which means that a Theme is just one of the Profile settings - this allows setting a separate theme for each Profile and quickly changing it along with all other Profile settings. Each profile allows you to customize the following options: Ring volume, Increasing ring (yes/no), Vibrator (on/off), Ringtone, SMS tone, MMS tone, Cell broadcast tone, Email tone, Voice message tone, Beamed file tone, Warning tone, Button click tone, Screen tap tone, Theme and Appearance (UI colors, skins, icons' "halo", background picture, hardware button tone). You can quickly switch between profiles by tapping the speaker icon on the status bar and selecting Profile name from the list. The window also allows to quickly override profile settings of ring and multimedia volume and enabling or disabling the Silent mode.

P30's Applications launcher displays three icons per row as opposed to 2 icons per row in P800/P900 and Motorola A92x. More icons per row means more icons displayed simultaneously, i.e. quicker access to applications. Similiarily to other UIQ phones, the AppLauncher can also be switched to a list view (13 lines per screen).

Phone is just one of the applications - as there is no separate "Flip closed" mode there is also no special "phone mode". The device starts with Applications Launcher as its default screen but you can always quickly invoke the Phone application by either selecting its icon from the shortcuts bar on top of the screen or by pressing the green "dial" button (pressing it another time will take you to the call log where you can quickly select and dial last dialled/answered/missed calls' numbers). Phone application consists of three windows: main window with network information area and speed dial thumbnails, call log screen with lists of all dialled/received calls and a window with large, virtual phone keypad with keys big enough to use your fingers to enter the number (which is just one of the options as you can also use the hardware keypad). With Phone application in the foreground, you can quicky lock the hardware keypad and the touchscreen by pressing and holding the "#" key. Keypad and touchscreen can also be locked automatically, after some period of inactivity. Key combination to unlock the screen and keypad is "#" and "*".

The P30 provides advanced handwriting recognition based on smARTwriter engine from Advanced Recognition Technologies. Unlike P900's letter-by-letter input, the P30 allows you to write full words or sentences - you can even fill the entire screen. Recognition starts only after you make a pause (which can be set to either short, medium or long). You can also customize the color of your handwriting, line thickness and whether to automatically add a space at the end or not.

If that's not enough for you, we've got even more good news: the P30 allows you to teach it how to correctly recognize your handwriting. The Personalize option of handwriting configuration lets you draw each single character and add it to the HWR database. From now on the phone will be using your own patterns instead of the standard ones.

When you start writing on the screen, the device automatically displays a small toolbar. It makes handwriting even more convenient. The toolbar lets you quickly switch between handwriting and cursor mode (which is useful when you need to use a scrollbar or tap a button or menu with handwriting active, so that your actions are not mistakenly recognized as characters or symbols), enter space, carriage return (new line) or delete characters, switch between character sets (letters, digits, symbols) or several supported HWR languages (English, Italian, Spanish, French in our unit) or quickly display a small window with special characters difficult to enter using HWR (like e.g. colon, semicolon, underline, asterisk, percent etc). The toolbar can be minimized or dragged around the screen.

BenQ P30 also provides text input using virtual QWERTY keyboard displayed on the screen. It looks and works the same as in the P800/900.

P30's smart battery provides detailed information about its current conditions and remaining power level. By tapping the battery icon you can not only check the percentage of remaining power but also approximate remaining standby time in hours and minutes as well as temperature of the battery.

P30 supports the Flight mode which provides full access to the device with phone part and Bluetooth disabled. Unlike the Sony Ericsson Px00, the P30 can enter the Flight mode also without any SIM card inserted.

Screen brightness can be fully adjusted using a slider. The setting is accessible via Control Panel. Screen saver can be set to either blank screen, custom picture or GIF animation, or large, analog and digital clock displayed over a nice picture (different views for day and night).

The P30 allows you to set your own user greeting which is shown when the system is loading. Unlike in Px00 phones, the text can be very long and you may use various font colors and styles (italic, underline, bold).

BenQ P30 is equipped with faxmodem, which means that it can serve as both modem and fax for your desktop PC or laptop. Unfortunately, fax messaging is not supported directly on the device - you can't send or receive faxes using just the phone. Let's hope that this function can be implemented with 3rd party software.

Messaging, Contacts, Agenda, Jotter, Time, To-Do, Calculator, Remote Sync, Online services and GPRS data log applications look and work exactly the same as in Sony Ericsson Px00 range of phones.

Voice Recorder also looks the same but it provides one important enhancement: possibility of recording phone conversations.

Camcorder application supports both making still pictures and recording movies with audio. It can be quickly launched using Camera button located on the left side of the phone. Camcorder supports 1-2-6x digital zoom for both pictures and movies and can be switched to a full screen mode providing much larger "viewfinder" area. Video recording time is only limited by free storage memory, but you can restrict it (if you want to) by either size in kilobytes, size in seconds, percentage of free disk space or MMS-compliance. You can choose between MPEG4SP and H263 codecs and three levels of quality (low, medium, high).

Music player application supports MP3 and offers nice graphic spectrum analyzer. You can choose multiple files for playback and enable Shuffle or Repeat options. Sound volume is very high via both the loudspeaker and stereo headset.

Video player offers a full screen playback mode.

Photobase application is a picture viewer with full screen mode and a slideshow function with many transition effects.

Picsel Viewer is a document viewer supporting many popular document types (HTML, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe, etc). Both quality and performance are much better than of P800/P900 built-in document viewer.

The built-in Web/WAP browser is the same as in P900 but, of course, one can install the Opera browser to get even better support for WWW browsing.

The P30 supports voice dialling, voice commands and Magic word. It supports both Handsfree and Headset Bluetooth profile, which provides compatibility with all existing Bluetooth audio devices. Preferred sound device can be set to Phone, Headset or Handsfree mode and you can set it to use either in-band ringtone or normal ringtone via the speaker.

3. Summary