Porsche owners are a rare breed and the same can be said of the Porsche Design P’9522 Black Edition phone. With its S$2,280 (US$1,628.57) price tag, the P’9522 isn’t the handset meant for the average Joe. It’s milled from a block of aluminum and has the requisite number of radios including quad-band GSM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and FM receiver to make us raise an eyebrow for a device of this caliber. However, the frustrating touchscreen user interface killed all our enthusiasm for this phone.

Design

A lot of times in the design of a handset, it can get away with either looking elegant like the iPhone or have a chassis machined from precious materials like a Vertu. The Porsche Design P’9522 is, unfortunately, neither. It’s solid, that much we concede as it feels like we’re dropping a block of aluminum when we put the handset down on the desk. The smooth brushed aluminum back with laser-etched text is a stark contrast to the less slippery glossy front when held in the hands.

The words “Porsche Design” are inscribed above the 2.8-inch AMOLED display. Below are the Call and End keys with a gold-strip sensor between. Combined, this vaguely resembles a car’s frontal view if we imagine hard enough. Further down are four rows of blade-thin lines which form your numeric keypad. We’d hesitate to call these buttons as they are really not, both in size and tactility. We don’t think we have fat thumbs, but it takes only one to nearly obscure two-thirds of the pad which makes it frustrating to even type a short message without having to use the tips of our nails.

On the sides you can find the proprietary cable connection, camera shutter and volume controls that are surprisingly usable. Around back are the 5-megapixel camera, LED light and onboard speakers. A handsfree earpiece, 2GB microSD card, travel charger, software CD, warranty card and documentation are included in the bundle.

Features

The P’9522 doesn’t let you unlock your Porsche or fire up its engines, even though we were secretly hoping that Porsche would include these features to differentiate it from the premium Nokia devices and the Vertus. Call us shallow, but which geek won’t fancy such cool tricks?

There are quad-band GSM radio, GPS, Bluetooth A2DP and Wi-Fi radios built-in, but we were soon disappointed by an absurd touchscreen user interface which was probably one of the worst we’ve encountered. You cannot tap an item on a list to open it. Instead you’ll either have to scroll to that option and tap another button to activate, or hit the corresponding number on the keypad. Scrolling in the menus was also nothing less than a frustrating experience. The highlight bar goes off way too fast (perhaps it’s a Porsche thing) and we ended up missing the intended option all the time. Even unlocking the phone was an unusually cumbersome three-step process. You hit the End key to activate the screen, then press * to bring up the Validate option, and then tap on it to finally unlock the device. Throw a nearly non-usable keypad on top of all these, and we have a handset that barely fulfills its basic calling.

This Porsche has one thing that’s unique though, and that’s its fingerprint sensor. But even with that, we felt half-hearted about it after a while. It’s a neat feature that lets us map our fingers to 10 specific phone actions, but the learning curve was plenty steep. We had to remember which digit did what, once we got past the multiple steps required to modify the fingerprint database onboard and the messy interface.

Java applications such as the Opera Mini browser and Wayfinder Navigator come preinstalled, but they were somewhat handicapped by the less-than-intuitive touch interface on the P’9522. There’s also no email support on this device, which didn’t bother us as much anymore halfway through our review.

The 5-megapixel camera, on the other hand, had quite a few features. We could geotag images, adjust white balance, color effects, timer and toggle the macro mode. Shutter lag was measured at 0.7 second, which was slower than the average camera-phone, so hold your P’9522 steady even after you press the shutter. As for image quality, colors were washed-out both in our Lab test shots and outdoor snaps. The autofocus was unreliable, which resulted in many blurry snaps.

Performance

The 880mAh lithium-ion battery is rated for up to 4 hours of talktime and 12.5 days on standby. If we used it for only calling and short texting, we reckon it’d be able to last at least two full days. There are equalizers and sound effects for the music player, but that did little for the audio quality of the P’9522. Fortunately, call quality was crystal-clear via the earpiece and onboard speakers.

Conclusion

When the Porsche Design P’9522 Black Edition was launched in Singapore a couple of weeks earlier, the company said there would be only 100 pieces available. In hindsight, that’s 100 too many considering the sticker shock of S$2,280 (US$1,628.57) doesn’t quite justify the fact that the handset doesn’t even get the crucial basics of a touchscreen phone right. A premium Nokia Arte or Sirroco would make better choices, or if you can afford it, a Vertu can be had for about twice the price with less grief using it and free concierge service thrown in for a year.

Damian Koh