I was looking for a cell phone which would be around rs. 10, 000 INR having good music quality, camera with 1+ megapixel, Radio, color display, decent looking phone and I came across this gadget.
Music output quality:- I am into music and I do play guitar also, I don’t want to sound lofty but I am stating this becoz I wanted you guys to know that I do am a bit good when it comes to understanding the sound output being good or not. anyway, lets get started..
Handsfree:- So when I was testing this music output from cell phone through handsfree I was blown to check out how beautiful the bass effect where sounding. Whenever you are testing sound quality you have to make sure the bass effect is coming well otherwise there is no use no matter how heavy and loud you play. I increased the volume and checked if the sound was blasting (ofcourse it depends on the quality of the song being played; hint: the more memory size a song takes the more quality it will give) and it was sounding perfect. Bass was more evident when I set the equalizer to "bass booster". I really enjoy listening music on this phone.
Speakers:- It is disappointing, but I was anyways not expecting much from the speaker as I could see the physical output designed on this phone was so small (it is in-lined with the boundary of camera unit backside). It is not loud enough, quality is not upto the mark. However, I always believed that you can’t expect speakers to be good from such small unit. I mean I have seen phone whose output quantity is massive (read: loud) however it does not mean necessarily to output produced is adept. If you want sound from speaker play your music system buddy.
display:- colour display is really wonderful than I expected. I have watched few cool quality clips and animated stuffs it was really amusing. Some good themes would really make your display look cool and sec-c.
Voice quality:- When I communicate on the phone, the person on the otherside always complained about the amplification of the sound going on background (eg: If I am talking while travelling, the person on otherside complains about the extra sound of the traffic coming around). I was nokia user too, so I can actually understanding this problem. The other problems (weak signal, voice quality etc...) is related to the service you use. Bottomline, voice quality is pretty ok however the background noise get amplified resulting irritating or even abusing recipient behaviour!!
Camera:- camera is decent. I mean, I am not much of that gadget person however I get decent picture quality photos. Some tips:- do not shake the phone while clicking pictures it will avoid making the pic blurred. camera phone is a camera phone and digital camera is a digital camera, dont expect the pics to look better when magnified. You can experiment with a picture using different features provided as given below:
1) night mode.
2) shoot mode: normal, panorama, frames and burst
3) picture size: (camera:large (1600 * 1200), medium:(640 * 480) and small (160 120)) (video camera: large (176 144) small (128 * 96))
4) self-timer
5) effects: black & white, negative, sepia and solarize)
6) white balance: cloudy, daylight, flourenscent etc...
As you see picture size for video camera is not as good as still camera the video quality hampers. so I usually take pictures rather shooting videos. Oh yeah, I need to mention that flash light is really a thumbs up.
memory: extexnal and extendible. You will recieve 256 mb memory card with the phone.
Usablity, durability, reliablity & navigation:- Stating again, I was a nokia user and believe its a marketing strategy of making usabilty and navigation of sony exactly opposite of nokia’s. (eg: to lock keypad in sony press * and then menu in nokia its vice-versa). I must admit nokia’s navigation is user friendly compared to sony but it is matter of time you will get use to sony navigation and usability, I mean come on, it is not that rocket science thing.
Durability/reliability: Any camera phone should be used carefully, you can’t expect the phone to work with its full functions on if you are one of those apes who jump around banging their phones here and there. I had kept my phone off for about 2 months and camera was not working properly for sometime so make sure you use all the functions regularly. It is not very delicate piece even I have made it dive here and there but it still stood by me but be careful with it, it does deserve to be kept well.
Definitely, a 3 star!