Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very Slick Phone with a nice Camera, November 5, 2008
I've been using this phone for about a month now on T-Mobile (upgraded from a RAZR) without any issues. Just stick the SIM card in and you're good to go. When I shopped around for a phone, I had a few requirements: candy-bar body, good camera, and mostly no hassle features for everything else. I don't text message very much, nor do I use my phone as an MP3 player.
Firstly, the phone's look and feel are superb. It feels solid in the hand and unnoticeable in the pocket. As mentioned in the specs, it is one of the thinnest phones out there, and the construction feels solid, with metal back plate. The sliding mechanism that shields the camera's lens feel a bit wobbly and flimsy, but has so far not deteriorated with heavy use. The screen is a little small, but bright and crisp, with perfect visibility under direct sunlight. Directional pad, as well as call/cancel, and context buttons are all where you expect them to be and provide just the right amount of tactile feedback when pressed. Be aware that this is a SMALL phone, and you will have trouble hitting these small buttons if you have large fingers. That said, the keypad itself leaves much to be desired. The keys themselves are arrayed at an angle, making it somewhat confusing as to which button you're going to end up pressing. Your eyes tell you one thing, but your fingers tell you another. The only that helps seems to be either dialing slowly and carefully or simply trying to ignore your fingers telling you what button it's over.
The highlight of this phone is undoubtedly the 5.0 MP camera. The lens is at the top of the camera and is shielded by a sliding bar at the top that is honestly quite slick. When you pull it out to activate camera mode, a blue led strip lights up breifly and fades away. This serves no practical function, but is cool nonetheless. Once in camera mode, touch-sensitive buttons light up along either side of the screen. Taking pictures is best done turning the camera horizontally and using the dedicated camera trigger on the top (depress half way to focus and fully to snap). Since this is still a camera phone, shutter speed and shot-to-shot still leave much to be desired. However, it is FAR better than the iphone. The digital viewfinder is somewhat misleading as it will freeze the frame when you depress the trigger. However, this frame will be replaced by a preview of the actual picture taken (which will often be more clear). As a cyber-shot camera, it has the standard features such as face-detection, auto-focus, burst mode, etc. The flash is weak at times, but adequete (just be careful because it will drain your battery). Typical shot-to-shot time is long on this phone, but I find that most of the time, pictures are clear on the first shot. If you are really paranoid, the burst-mode will take 9 pictures in the span of a second, and you can pick which ones you want to keep or discard. Under low light conditions, pictures will turn out grainy unless you use flash. Pictures taken with this camera will not rival dedicated point-and-shoot digital cameras, but it is leaps and bounds better than other cameraphones I've used. As a point of reference, I enjoy taking pictures wherever I go, and this is the only device I bring. Considering how light it is, and the fact that it's a phone, it is honestly a perfect combo device for casual photographers. The phone is also capable of capturing 30 fps video, which I have not really had the opportunity to play around with. The initial samples I took turned out grainy, but maintained a consistent framerate.
The phone comes with standard sony-ericsson software loaded onto the ~160 MB of internal memory. The software is quite intuitive and mimics the media browsing experience on the PSP and Playstation. The PC suite includes the abiltiy to sync music, outlook contacts and calendars, and other files. While a bit bloated, the PC suite does its job. A few issues I should mention: the phone does not seem to be able to sync media files via bluetooth. This is really a shame because being able to sync pictures wirelessly is a very handy feature. The memory is expandable using sony's proprietary memory stick technology (the micro variant), which comes in sizes up to 8GB. The phone has a proprietary connection jack that is used to charge, sync, and adapt to regular headphones. The basic headphones included with the phone are low quality and become uncomfortable to wear after only a few minutes. If you intend to use this device as an MP3 player, definately have a better set of headphones handy. As I mentioned before, the keypad is terrible, making this phone unuseable for extended texting and/or browsing.
Call quality is great, and I notice no difference in reception from my RAZR. Speakerphone volume is loud and the device works seamlessly with my hands free bluetooth headset. The included PC Suite also provides settings for using the phone as an internet connection for your bluetooth enabled laptop.
Bottom line, this phone will turn heads with its sexy design. If are you looking for a very slick and stylish candy-bar phone with a great built-in camera, look no further. If you lean toward emphasizing picture quality from your phone, you may want to wait for the next generation of 8.0 MP phones such as the C905. Just do not expect to text or browse effectively.
|
|
|
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Decent phone, when it works, February 28, 2009
This phone is great in many respects, when it works. I had it for about 2 months after finally deciding that I would send it back to Amazon.
First the good things:
-NetFront web browser is fast and renders both mobile and full-HTML ("real" internet) websites without issues, in general. Supports Flash, JavaScript, and CSS. Keeps your history and allows for password saving so that you can quickly log on to your favorite websites, as well as detection of RSS feeds so that you can keep up with the latest updates.
-Email client is easy to set up and works fairly well; allows saving and viewing of attachments.
-Alarms feature gives you great control over when the alarm goes off, snooze duration, whether it sounds on Silent mode, etc.
-Support of Bluetooth PAN profile lets you very easily use the phone as a modem with your computer (tethering) with just one click (at least on Mac OS X Leopard).
-Bluetooth has great range and audio fidelity with A2DP profile. I was able to leave the phone in my bedroom and go into the living room while listening to a podcast (~15 feet with some walls).
-Decent battery life. With email checks every 30 minutes and RSS feed updates every hour during waking hours, along with 1-2 hours of phone calls/day, I got about 2 days of use from the phone before it needed recharging.
-Camera with geotagging: the bundled version of Google Maps lets you view where you've taken photos with the phone. The accuracy of this can at times be quite good.
-Java apps support: I was able to install and use the GMail app, as well as eBuddy for instant messaging.
-T9 text entry: the version of T9 on this phone is pretty advanced, with support for multiple languages, next-word prediction (offers suggestions for what the next word should be before you type any letters based on frequency of usage in the past), and full-word completion after entering just the first few letters of a word (also based on past usage frequency). This often makes texting/emailing a breeze.
-Extensive copy/paste support: pretty much all SE apps have copy/paste support built in, as well as most input fields in third-party apps. The way it's done is rather intuitive and works very well.
-Solid feel, very thin and light-weight. This phone feels like it's well-built, except for the keyboard, as noted below. It also feels great because of how thin and light it is.
Now for the bad:
-Interface lags, and at times freezes. My main complaint with this phone was that at times, it was way too easy to make it lock up. Viewing a page that's too long with the browser was a guaranteed way to do it. Other times it wasn't entirely clear why the phone froze, which just made it more off-putting and frustrating. Putting the phone into flight mode and then having an event reminder go off resulted in the phone turning on and freezing during the start-up process, while I was onboard a plane! The only thing I could do was remove the battery after the phone was stuck in this state for at least a minute.
-The phone would randomly restart on me while on standby. This happened enough times that it became a nuisance.
-The email app allows you to check for email at a predefined interval. When there's new mail, it gives you an alert. For me, after about 2 weeks of usage, it started giving new mail alerts even when there was no new mail at all. Clearing out my inbox did not solve the problem. In addition, there's no way to define a "quiet" time, i.e. at night, such that no check would take place; this is a shame because it would definitely improve battery life.
-The supplied Google Maps app is not upgradeable. While you can manually download a newer version of Google Maps, it doesn't support "My Location," which eliminates about half the usefulness of the app, and it prompts you for using your internet connection every time.
-Java apps cannot be permanently authorized to use your data plan; you must answer a prompt every time you start them. For internet apps like GMail and eBuddy, this can get annoying.
-Keyboard too cramped: while I don't think, as another reviewer said, that this phone is terrible for texting, the keyboard is a little cramped, and you do waste time by accidentally pressing nearby keys if typing very fast. I think combined with the more advanced T9 system here, you would still end up typing a little faster than on older SE/Nokia phones, but they could have easily moved the screen a bit further up the device and made the keys a bit taller; this would have made a big difference in usability. Also, the keyboard itself feels a bit flimsy as there's a single piece of plastic covering all the keys which can be seen moving up/down with usage.
-Strange RSS standby ticker behavior: this phone has the ability to display "new" RSS articles on the standby screen in a "ticker" format. This is great, but the articles displayed are all the articles, instead of just the new ones, and it's not entirely clear how to mark articles as "read." Also, once you "hide" the ticker, it's not clear how it comes back and why. Finally, scheduling updates for feeds doesn't work consistently.
Some might wonder why I've barely mentioned anything about the camera, despite this being a "Cybershot" phone; that's because it's nothing to write home about. The camera is OK, but not exactly great; for example, the Sony Ericsson K850i takes better pictures and has Xenon, rather than LED, flash. I think I would rather have a lower-resolution (i.e. 3MP) sensor that was higher-quality and had better optics with real flash. In addition, the geotagging data that is added to the photos is in some non-standard, proprietary format, such that iPhoto, Flickr, and other apps designed to read geotagging data from photos cannot read it; i.e. the only way to "see" the geotagging data embedded in the photos is to view the photos on the phone with the embedded Google Maps app. You can view only one photo at a time on the map as well, which is really a shame.
Overall, this is a decent phone. However, the quirks mentioned above, in particular, the phone freezing/restarting and "false" new-email notifications, made me decide to return this phone after all. If all the advertised features worked as expected, and reliably, I would definitely keep it.
|
|
|
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
my review, January 13, 2009
nice slim phone, a little wider than some other phones, nice touch screen camera, video quality is good, bluetooth tricky to install had to take it to sony store to get bluetooth devices conected, overall a good phone.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
Free Offer: Get a free international GSM SIM card from Mobal, ($20 bonus airtime included), with the purchase of any unlocked phone from Amazon.com, and talk on your cell phone in more than 170 countries. Just add both items to your Shopping Cart and use this promotional code at checkout: FREESIM3. The savings will be deducted from your order total. Offer valid while supplies last. (Applies only to products sold by Amazon.com. Limit one per customer. Does not apply to products sold on our site by third-party merchants or through third-party areas such as Amazon.com Marketplace, Auctions, or zShops.)
