Sony Ericsson announced the P990 last October. It is the middle of March and I still cannot buy one, which by now is a more interesting fact about the phone than anything on its spec sheet.
The hardware was never the problem. A 2.6 inch touchscreen, a keyboard hidden behind a flip that covers the numeric pad, Wi-Fi, a 2 megapixel camera, and the general assumption that this is the device that finally makes the P-series something a business buyer picks instead of tolerates. On paper it is the most capable thing Sony Ericsson has ever attempted.
What has gone wrong is underneath, and it is the same thing that goes wrong every time somebody tries to ship a serious software platform on a phone schedule. UIQ 3 is a substantial rewrite sitting on a substantial rewrite of Symbian below it, and both of those were announced as finished considerably before they behaved as though they were. Every month this slips is a month of somebody discovering that a component two layers down does not do what the integration plan assumed.
I have some sympathy, and less than I used to. Announcing in October a device you cannot ship until the following summer is a choice, not an accident. It buys you a good quarter of press and it costs you the thing that actually matters, which is that by the time the P990 arrives it will be competing against hardware designed a year after it was, and every reviewer will open with the delay rather than the phone.
The part that frustrates me is that Sony Ericsson is currently very good at exactly the opposite discipline. The Walkman phones ship when they say they will, do one thing properly, and sell. Somebody inside that company knows how to run a product schedule. It just is not whoever is running this one.
My worry is not that the P990 arrives late. It is that it arrives late and fine. A device this delayed needs to be startling to justify the wait, and everything I have seen suggests it will land as a competent, heavy, slightly awkward business phone that reviews at seven out of ten. That is the outcome that quietly ends a product line, because nobody cancels a seven out of ten. They just stop ordering the next one.