Review At first glance the Sony Ericsson Yari gives a very good impression of a lowish-end slider, with its so-so looks and smallish screen. Look a little closer, however, and it becomes clear that the Yari is a lot more fun than it first appears, with Wii-style gesture-recognition gaming, a 5Mp Camera, aGPS and HSDPA fast internet access.
The Yari is a small, lightweight handful at 100×48x16mm and 115g with rather dull black looks, although it’s also available in white or silver with red or pink highlights. Above the LCD screen are two gaming buttons – more on those later – and below it are a couple of programmable soft keys, with call start and stop, shortcuts and cancel buttons flanking a circular five-way navpad. Pressing the edges of this offers shortcuts such as music player, contacts and messaging, with the ability to programme it to whichever functions you fancy.
Around the sides are SE’s familiar, but doomed, two-pin FastPort power/sync socket, barely visible volume rocker, a micro SD card slot (like the FastPort, SE is moving steadily away from its Memory Stick option) covered by a plastic grommet and a Camera shutter button. Around the back, which is covered in a tactile rubberised plastic casing, is the recessed lens of the Camera with LED flash and Stereospeakers. Read the rest of this entry »
By Sandra Vogel and Alex Poyner (via reghardware.co.uk)
Review Sony Ericsson’s latest marketing wheeze is to release a slew of new handsets with seemingly meaningless names. Satio, Yari, Naite and the handset currently under scrutiny, Aino, are models the company has lined up to compete with Apple and Android. The Aino is meant to be a media fan’s handset first and foremost. It also has a fairly strong set of general specifications, including an 8Mp Camera, Wi-Fi and GPS.
If you have a PlayStation 3, you can control it from a distance with Aino’s Remote Play feature. The phone will pick up video and audio streamed from the PS3, and you can use the console’s Play TV DVR add-on to watch, pause and record live TV if you live in Italy, France, Spain, Germany or the UK – more on this later.
Overall, it sounds like quite a lot of innovation is going on with the Aino, but in reality it doesn’t hang together that well. Things can be clunky and Sony Ericsson may well be trying to do too much fancy stuff without getting the basics right. This is a chunky slider phone. It has to be to accommodate its 3in screen. But with dimensions of 104mm x 50mm x 15.5mm when closed, it isn’t ideal for slim-fit pockets. It weighs 134g and extends to 150mm with the slide opened.
Underneath the smooth and responsive slide, is the relatively cramped number pad. The overall balance of the handset doesn’t sit comfortably under the fingers and feels as though the phone might topple forwards when tapping out numbers. The navpad and function keys are based around Sony Ericsson’s classic circular design. Visually, it’s fine but, again, all buttons, bar the navpad, are a bit small. And yet there‘s a 4mm of empty space to left and right of this area, which could have utilised to allow for larger keys. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Sony Ericsson tends to get the most publicity from its Cyber-shot cameraphones and Walkman music phones. Not unusual, that, but the company also has a large array of mid-range and lower end mobiles. A case in point: the S312. At £100 Sim-free or £69 from T-Mobile on pay-as-you-go, it fits right into that lower price bracket.
The S312 makes no pretensions to be a Cyber-shot. But despite being pitched as a bit of an all rounder, there is a greater emphasis on the Camera than you might expect from a low-cost voice-centric mobile.
To that end, it does steal a clever Camera idea from its higher end siblings. Hit the small round green button on the right side of the phone and you are into the Camera software. Obviously, that’s nothing new. But when you are in Camera mode the 3, 6, 9 and # keys double up as Camera and video shooting shortcuts, small icons to the far right of the key area reminding you of their functions. Read the rest of this entry »
Review We recently took a look at the jewel in Sony Ericsson’s ‘C’ for Camera range, the 8Mp C905 Plus, and so the arrival of the C903 marks an exercise in cost cutting. Yet, this mid-range model with a 5Mp Camera retains many of the features to be found in its higher priced and higher spec’d cousin.
The C903 is a deliciously compact little slider, shaving 7mm off the length and 2mm off the depth of the chunky C905 and it’s also a good 40g lighter at 96g that, for some, may well be worth a trade-off in Camera functions.
The TFT LCD screen has the same 2.4in, 262,000-colour, 240 x 320-pixel dimensions of that on the C905 but the more expensive phone’s mineral-coated display is less prone to reflection and is more easily viewed in sunlight. That said, the screen on the C903 is still excellent, offering vibrant colours with intense sharpness and brightness, showing off the pics taken with the onboard Camera at their best. Read the rest of this entry »
Review If you’re a music mad, photo enthusiast, then Sony Ericsson has you in its sights with the W995 – its most advanced convergence of Camera and music phone features to date. Featuring a Walkman media player and an 8.1Mp Camera, the W995 also has HSDPA 3G, Wi-Fi, A-GPS and a new media sync system for Macs and Windows PCs.
At first glance, this is a chunky little slider at 97×49x15mm and 113g but, considering what’s stuffed into the W995, it’s a fairly solid and compact package. The casing is pretty busy, with the central D-pad on the front surrounded by six buttons: call start and stop, cancel, shortcuts and two soft keys.
On the sides are music player controls, which proved to be easy to operate with the W995 tucked away in a pocket. There’s also a dedicated Camera shutter button, a zoom rocker, a Walkman button, Sony Ericsson’s standard two-pin Fast Port power connection and a 3.5mm jack plug, which is nice, but somewhat superfluous since an adaptor for the power plug also features a 3.5mm headphone socket and is included with the supplied earbuds. Read the rest of this entry »
