I must confess that I first noticed this phone because of its cheesy TV ad. This had a teenage boy who’s caught using the phone by his dad. The boy looks sheepish and hands over the phone. To his embarrassed surprise, his dad joins the party and does his John Travolta impersonation from Saturday Night Fever with the phone’s MP3 player booming away. What added to the ad’s cheesiness was the Hindi disco number laid over the original OST. Does that make the phone cheesy? No.
This phone has a unique form factor, by which I mean the design and shape. Not one person who handles it for the first time is able to figure how the phone opens. Which to my mind is a plus and one of the reasons why this phone is ubercool. I won’t tell you how it opens--please see it for yourself. The pleasure will be all yours.
It’s a phone with Walkman technology in it. Sony’s renowned audio standards are evident when you plug in the earphones. Those earphones (you get an extra pair of plugs in the box) are so snug, you can cut out the sounds of Mumbai traffic even without the radio or the MP3 player on. When you switch them on, you will find yourself smiling smugly. Of course, if you want to share the clarity of the sound with more than one person at a time, feel free to turn on the 3 speakers. Yes, it has 3 speakers, another feature that ups the cool factor.
Sony knows you would want to access all its key features at your fingertips. So the MP3 player, the GPRS services, the camera, the radio, and ahem, the phone functions are all accessible without having to open the phone. Of course you will want to open the phone as much as possible--I have told you why previously. Btw, that bar you see at the top is the antenna! The bar of coolness has been raised!
The 1.3 MP camera with up to 4x digital zoom is equipped with all kinds of settings. You can switch between still and video, change picture sizes, change shoot modes (normal, burst, panaroma, frame), adjust white balance, toggle between night mode and daylight mode, and give your pictures sepia, negative, b&w, and solarized effects. And there’s the light that you can use as a flash! These are more than what you will typically use for taking most pictures, but if you know when and why these should be used, you’ll love the diversity of options.
The top of the phone has a squat joystick-like feature that seems common in most high-end phones now. You can set the four ’keys’ to access the functions you want directly--this is the shortcuts feature. Those keys are superb when you are playing games.
The handsfree that comes with the boxed handset has two parts: the receiver and the earphones. You can unplug the earphones from the receiver and connect other speakers or another set of earphones. Like I said, it’s cool.
So what’s not cool about this model? Some people who think bigger is better and are carried away by breathless hype think its 256 MB of storage is too less. Here’s my opinion: unless you are the kind of person who cannot choose the music they carry with them wisely, or if you take photos or videos indiscriminately, or carry gigs of data everywhere you go, 256 MB should work out nicely.
An MP3 is 4 MBs average so that’s 64 songs. MPEGs are larger so maybe you will have to carry fewer songs and videos. But like I said if you need to fill every moment and I mean every moment with a sound or picture, you will never be satisfied with any size.
Of course, you would be entitled to say you want the option of adding more storage. Well, then this phone is not for you. I must confess I was disappointed too when I heard I couldn’t use an add-on card. But the ones that did were much more expensive. At the price I bought it 6 months ago, this one had the right balance, which is important to me.
There are three applications, VideoDJ, MusicDJ, and PhotoDJ, that allow you to mix videos, music, and photos respectively, although I must confess I haven’t used them so far. Also, you can use PlayNow, Sony’s version of iTunes. I will experiment with them soonest I upgrade the OS on my PC. Which reminds me the applications need Windows 2000 at least. So if you use Windows 98, tough luck!
Now for something that I wasn’t happy about: if you use Hutch, this phone is not compatible with their GPRS service, so no internet, no downloads, no email, and no chatting. Neither the Sony Ericsson dealer nor Hutch told me about this when I bought it. I blasted Hutch over it because their executive lied to me about the compatibility. Only when I spoke with their tech support and went to their Hutch World website, did I discover this phone doesn’t work with Hutch’s GPRS. I checked their site again recently, and the situation hasn’t changed. I don’t know why Sony Ericsson hasn’t done any thing about this. I plan to take this up with them. Or if they are really tracking the market, they will read this and fix it. (See update in the comments section)
When I bought it, there was another problem: It was very difficult to find plastic cases for this model. But I lucked out last month when I found a snug-fitting plastic case at Andheri station. Incidentally, the case turned out to be sturdy enough to protect the phone when I accidentally dropped it from nearly 6 feet up at the railway station. Amazingly, the phone didn’t break at all, and I haven’t noticed any problem so far with the functioning.
The box contains the following:
1) Handset (orange or indigo skin with silver body)
2) Extra skin (the alternate color of the two colors above: I believe they also had a ivory skin but it hasn’t been available for some time)
3) Handsfree kit (with extra set of earphone plugs)
4) CD
5) USB cable
6) Manual
7) Charger
8) Battery
Btw, in the 6 months since I bought it, I have noticed something that brings a smile to my face: most owners seem to be women. I like to think I know what women want :-)