Camera Phones Plaza

If you are familiar with the Sony Ericsson G705, then you already know what is all about the new Sony Ericsson W705. Both phones have the same design, both of them have alternative versions with UMA (for Orange), Sony Ericsson G705u respectively Sony Ericsson W705u, and both phones come with almost the same features. "Almost" the same features because G705 and W705 come from different ranges. The G705 is a lite business orientated model, while the W705 is marketed under the Walkman logo. The W705 is more appealing, because it targets a younger audience, primarily 16 to 25 year olds. As most of the Walk man branded phones, W705 will not be a market success from the launch point. First the price will go done with 15 to 25 percent, in the next six to eight months, and then it will become a good purchase.

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The Sony Ericsson Walkman buyers are people (even if young) more calculated, than the customers of Apple iPhone or the latest Nokia gadgets. Walkman brand is for people who are looking for a great balance between prices and features. This doesn't necessarily happen to Nokia customers, or Apple customers. Remember the huge line up in the summer of 2007 for the first iPhone? Or maybe the recently 2 million units sold of N97. Unfortunately 70 percent of nowadays customers jump into a purchase without planning ahead. Good for the manufacturers, bad for their clients finances. The Sony Ericsson W705 doesn't even have a direct competitor. It is a nice looking, slide form, music oriented phone. The Sony Ericsson W705 comes in two color choices (like most of the Walkman branded phones): passionate red and luxury silver.

Don't expect to a black finish, because Sony Ericsson is offering that color on the G705. If it would be offered on the W705, it would probably make confusion for the potential buyers. The back cover hinges on a side latch. Therefore it might seem not that solid in the matter of build. On the left side you will find the interface connector, while on the right side you will find the volume keys and camera trigger. On the top of the W705 you will find the music key, while on the back W705 sports the 3.15 megapixel camera lens and a LED flash. The walkman phone has a height of 95 mm, wide of 47.5 mm, deep of 14.3 mm with an estimated weight of 98 g. judging from this values you will get a pocket friendly phone.

The Sony Ericsson W705 runs in 2G networks (GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900), but also in 3G networks (HSDPA 900 / 2100). W705 is equipped with an average range display. Therefore you get a nice 2.4 inches TFT display with a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels, capable of rendering up to 256.000 colors. Beside the entry level wallpapers and screensavers you also get the excellent accelerometer sensor for auto rotate. The W705 screen can accommodate up to 9 text and 4 service lines (in some sub menus you might be able to accommodate even more). Unfortunately, in the sun the display gets washed. Therefore the legibility is at mediocre at best. The keypad is easy to use.

It is made out of too much plastic. Even so the middle size buttons feel nice at touch and provide good feedback. Unlike the W905, W705 offers a more comfortable keypad. All keys are lit in white, making them friendly to look at. Compared to the G705 keypad, the one found on W705 is not as good. Sony Ericsson didn't provide with specifications regarding the processor used or the random access memory included in the W705. The internal memory has a small value of 120 MB. You can improve this value by adding a memory stick micro M2 card. The W705 is already shipped with 1 GB M2 card, however you can easily go up to 8 GB values. Even so, this is a music oriented phone, and in doesn't have an x GB built in memory. Well Sony Ericsson understood that less is more, at list in the storage department.

The connectivity is ensured by Class 10 (4 + 1 / 3 + 2 slots) GPRS with 32 to 48 kbps, HSCSD, EDGE with Class 10 and 236.8 kbps, HSDPA up to 7.2 Mbps and HSUPA with 2 Mbps, Wi-Fi with 802.11 b/g support, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and 2.0 USB (used with Media Transfer, when the phone goes off and extends the data transfer speed up to 2 MB per second). You can also use the W705 as a modem; by connecting it to your laptop it will provide you sufficient speed for browsing. Sony Ericsson ships the W705 with a small 930 mAh Li - Pol battery (BST 38). The official standby time in the 2G network is about 400 hours, while in the 3G network is about 350 hours. In the 2G network the W705 battery will last for 10 hours of talk time, and up to 4 hours of talk tome in the 3G network. For an average consumer, these values mean around 2.5 days to 3 days.

The phone takes around 2 hours to charge its battery full. If you will use the Wi-Fi connection, then you should know that the W705's battery will last about 2 hours and 30 minutes. Because W705 plays in the middle range, Sony Ericsson equipped it with a 3.15 megapixel camera. You can use this camera to take pictures with three possible resolutions, 2048 x 1536 pixels, 1632 x 1224 pixels, 1280 x 960 pixels. You can chose to take pictures using the "fine" data compression or "normal" data compression. The camera comes with a full set of setting features: shutter sound, white balance, timer, night mode, effects, and shooting mode.

The user interface was not changed; you get the same Sony Ericsson operating system. However, this phone is walkman braded, making the music player from the W705 a good feature (even more with the Sens Me feature). Because of the accelerometer sensor, you can use the Shake Control on your W705. You just have to shake your W705 when listening to a playlist as you will turn the shuffle mode on.

The phone offers a good quality music playback as long as you use a pair of headphones, or stereo speakers. The sound offered is loud and by using the equalizer feature you can listen to music with any effect you would like. The Sony Ericsson W705 doesn't try to be an ultimate multimedia phone. It was created for the middle range, and sports a perfect balance between price and performances. However, as a nice surprise in this class, you get a full connectivity package, a relatively good battery and an excellent music player. If you are looking for a normal music phone, then the Sony Ericsson W705 is a safe choice.

If you are looking for a midrange music oriented music phone you should probably read this article. When you say music phone, and it is not iPhone, then you say Sony Ericsson Walkman. The Sony Ericsson W508 is a great music minded folder type phone. Sony claims that this phone is not for the youth who normally go for models such as Sony Ericsson W380. However the W508 is here to replace the W380.

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The Sony Ericsson W508 offers the full Walkman package at a bargain price. In terms of specs the Sony Ericsson W508 is similar with other Sony Ericsson slider phones, W910 and W595. Unfortunately all this three devices compete with each other; therefore in terms of sales this means disaster for the W508. In fact the only appealing features (in comparison with the other Walkman models) are its form factor and a 3.2 MP digital camera (way better than the old 2 MP camera on the W910). Also potential buyers might like the Style Up covers.

The Sony Ericsson W508 is shipped with a spare one. So why did the W508 arrived in the Sony Ericsson portfolio? Believe it or not, the W508 was created to save the W980 reputation. Sony Ericsson believed that their music player flagship, W980, will generate significant sales. Unfortunately they marketed with a high price list, therefore poor sales is the word of choice for the W980 sales success. But Sony Ericsson did not learn from the lack of success of the w980. They have positioned the new W508 at a price point higher than that of its two slider type predecessors with almost identical list specs. So we have a not flagship, music oriented slider, with a no nonsense design for middle aged men, with an asking price of an unsuccessful flagship music phone.

I am starting to wonder if Sony Ericsson actually has a marketing plan, or if they just change the draft depending how the wind blows. Beside itself, the main disadvantage of this phone are: the camera who lacks autofocus or for that matter LED flash, low grade video recording at only QVGA with 15 frames per second, no web browser screen auto rotate and no document reader (shocking). However the W508 tries to be a user friendly phone, by having ways to interact to you (like Track ID - to find certain tracks, Sense Me - so you can pick songs based on your mood, Shake Control and Even Gesture Control).

The W508 design is somewhat close to the design of the Sony Ericsson W980; the same layout of touch sensitive controls, two color choices (Poetic White and Metal Grey), approach this phone device to the flagship's design. A unique feature is the removable extra front cover. You can now choose whatever color or pattern you like (sunny orange, architectural purple, forest green, midnight summer, splashed art, radial blue and others). The phone's case is made entirely out of plastic. The front cover is a rather light glossy plastic; the back cover is made out of rough plastic.

The opening mechanism is not a high luxury feature. The opening is done only manually (can anyone say back to 2004). Even more cheaply is the sound of the plastic case when you open or close the phone. The dimensions of the Sony Ericsson W508 are average for a flip phone. It has a height of 93.5 mm, wide of 50 mm, deep of 14 mm with a weight of 98 g. On the left side of the phone we have the dock connector, while on the right side we have the volume control keys and with a switch for the touch sensitive controls. The three keys of the music player are a play / pause key and skip coward and backward keys that also work for seeking. The Sony Ericsson W508 has a TFT display with up to 256 K colors. It sports a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels wide of 2.2 inches.

The screen size allows it to accommodate up to 9 text and 4 service lines. Overall, the main display boasts vibrant colors, it has a good color reproduction and it performs decent under sunlight. The secondary display is monochrome with a diagonal of 1.1 inches and a resolution of 36 x 128 pixels. It offers information such as: time, battery charge, and signal strength and network type as well as song information during playback. However its legibility under sunlight is bad. When it is not lighted it even blends in with the plastic case. The Sony Ericsson W508 is shipped with Li Ion battery (BST 39) with 920 mAh. In the 2G network the standby time goes up to 400 hours, while in the 3G network it has the same standby value. In the 2G network the talk time is up to 10 hours, while in the 3G network the value lowers to 4 hours. If you will listen to music continuously, then the battery will get drained in 22 hours. The W508's battery needs two and a half hours to charge itself up. The W508 is equipped with a 3.15 MP digital camera, with a resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels.

The camera also sports 1632 x 1536 pixels, 1280 x 960 pixels and 640 x 480 pixels resolutions. You have a few settings available in the camera interface: shutter sound, white balance, effects (negative, solarize, sepia and black and white), timer, night mode and shooting mode. The W508 can record video at 320 x 240 pixel resolution with 30 frames per second. The videos taken with the W508 are average quality. The Sony Ericsson device sports a not hot swappable card slot, memory stick micro M2 up to 16 GB. The new walkman 3.0 software sports DRM 2 support as well as support for MTP, which makes for direct music transfers with Windows Media Player. The player supports a big collection of file formats and has several equalizer presets.

The Sony Ericsson W508 runs in the 2G network (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900) and in the 3G network (HSDPA 2100 and HSDPA 850 / 1900 / 2100). The connectivity is ensured by the GPRS Class 10 (4+1 / 3+2 slots, 32 - 48 kbps), EDGE Class 10 (236.8 Kbps), HSDPA, Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP and USB. However the Wi-Fi is missing from the connectivity package. The Sony Ericsson W508 doesn't offer any significant upgrades than the already released slider models. The success of this phone is purely fictional. This device is for a small category of people. They will like it and buy it, but at the end of the day this phone will not be a market success. At bests it will have the same faith of the Sony Ericsson W980.

Sony Ericsson C905a looks more like a camera which has a phone as a feature. If you want a cool camera with you all the time, and you don't want to worry about having a real phone, C905a is perfect for you. If other features, except camera are very important for you, you may want to know what performances do the other features offer, and then make a decision. This phone is chunky, blocky, and weighs quite much for a phone. This is because of the camera module, and it might take more space in your pocket than most of the phones. The general impression you get when you see this phone is that the camera is on the first place, and the phone on the second.
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The exterior design is from plastic, and most of the back is made of this material, except where the camera cover is. The slide which protects the camera and the frame are made of metal, and the hatch which locks the camera must be open in order to use the camera.

On the front side, it has a large display and the d-pad is actually a square with a high rim on the edges. This works great in all directions, just like the central button does. On the left part of the d-pad there are the soft key, call key and application switcher key. On the right you can see the soft and the end keys and the clear/back one. They work ok, but it is kinda hard to make difference between them when you move the thumb up or down.

This phone is a slider, and the mechanism is quite strong. A smart snap locks firmly the phone, both in the closed and open positions, and when it is open, you can access the 12-key numeric pad. This is set about 2 mm below a ridge, but they don't actually offer the best travel and feedback. There are lines between each row of keys, and they are good because they let you know when you passed from one row to another.

On the left side, there is the hatch which covers the memory card slot, and the Sony Ericsson specific port, and also the data transfer port. On the right you can find the volume button and below there is a photo gallery button, the camera key and the camera shutter button. The volume toggle works pretty hard, but the other two buttons on the right side feel ok.


The display is great, it brings bright and colorful images in front of your eyes, and the images, icons and all the other elements displayed look crisp and sharp, and they are easy to read. This phone can be connected to AT&T's 3G HSDPA network. It works pretty good, and the signal is lost in areas where legitimately should have no signal, like subway. Signal performance is good for this phone. The big problems are with the sound, because it seems to be distorted and garbled when the volume is at maximum. The sound is great when the volume is set up at 80% and even at 40% it is loud enough. The speakerphone is ok too, but maybe the ringtones could have been a little bit louder.Battery performance is good, and it usually lasts for 2.5 days. The element which seems to drain out battery is the flash.

Phone's menu is a 12 icons grid, and some icons open folders, and others open applications. There are two main sections which we are interested in, and these are Entertainment and Settings, and here you can find a lot of interesting games and applications. You can listen to music, upload applications and transfer files. The green send key, pressed when on the home screen,will bring up the list with your recent calls. In the first tab there are all the calls, but next tabs sort them, and you can see separately the answered, the dialed and the missed calls.


I think that this device is first a camera, and then a phone. The camera is very powerful and the software tools are the same. They show much more attention to detail than the rest of the phone, which has typical SE features. Phone call quality and signal are excellent, but the music/media player is quite old, and it might need some improvements. The hardware can easily be categorized as cheap, though the performances are ok. If the camera is the most important for you, than this should be your purchasing decision. If you have other priorities, than you should take a look at other handsets.

This phone from Sony Ericsson wants to bring back in trends the flip phone. This is an entry-level product, targeted at the youth market, which wants to bring a retro style for the budget conscious Sony Ericsson fans. This music handset is certainly unique, and it is fashioned as a small portable music player which has in the same time a lot of space on the inside. It can store up to 470 songs on the memory card included in the purchasing kit. It also has the TrackID feature, which helps you find more information about the songs you listen, and you want to know more about.
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Sony Ericsson W350 is an old-style flip phone, which has a plastic cover on the keypad; this plastic cover opens towards the bottom of the phone, and SE used this design to allow easy access to the music control keys, which are on the outside of the flip. A small key lock switch is on the top of the device, but it applies only to the external keys, and when the flip is open, the keypad is enabled.

The flip, even is the most interesting design aspect for this mobile phone, is in the same time the handset's biggest issue. The flip is quite thin and flimsy, and when it it closed it wobbles over the phone's face; when open it seems very unstable. It actually provides nothing more than annoyance, and this brings the phone to a cheaper level. Closing the flip activates the Walkman, and this means that you cannot see the standy screen when this flip is closed.

This phone is an attempt to bring on the market a retro budget handset to the market, but actually it has no important pro points. If we take a look even in Sony Ericsson range, we can see that there are products which offer at least what W350 brings, and most of the time, even more. the flip is only for waking up some memories about mobile phones in the past years, but it has no real functionality. The handset is quite solid, and it has an above average quality, and the user interface is great. There are a lot of alternatives which could fit your budget plans, and I could say that W350 is not above these alternatives.

There is a Sony Ericsson product, W880, which is quite old now, but it is better than W350 in many aspects, and it can be purchased now at a price close to W350's price tag. Nokia also has a lot of music handsets, which have similar features and prices, like 5610 and 5310, and which have less annoying designs.

This mobile phone is good, but the only minus aspect is the flip. If you love this design, it might be the perfect phone for you, but if you don't, you could easily take a look at other manufacturer's products too.

If you don't like anymore the default themes on your Sony Ericsson mobile phone, you can use now a software application to create your own themes. Our mobile phone's theme is an external element of representativity for our personality, and I think it's great we can create our own themes for our devices. You can use your creativity and you can combine the images and graphics elements you want, and you can get rid of the boring default themes.
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Sony Ericsson offers a tool for the owners of this brand mobile phones and this application, Sony Ericsson Themes Creator offers you the possibility to change almost everything in your mobile phone's theme. You can change the standy screen, the menu and the application launcher and the calendar also. It has a tabbed interface and you can quickly switch the category. On the right side you can see the current theme and in the left side you make the changes.

The main disadvantage is that you can upload and use in your theme only GIF files, but the plus point is that you can change alert sounds for new emails, messages or for the events in your calendar. When you are done with the creation process, you can preview the theme, and you can see how it looks compiled, on a virtual mobile phone screen. You can make more changes, or you can save it and upload it on your mobile phone's memory.

You can pick your mobile phone's model from a drop list, and this list is quite large, but you can not update it, so if your phone is newer than the release date of this software, or newer than the last list update, you might not find it in the list. But anyway, there are some models which have a high compatibility with other phones' theme file, so you can try creating the theme for a model and then upload it on other mobile phone model.

The newer Sony Ericsson Themes Creator version, 4.0 offers a simplified wizard, and you can create a professional theme for you SE mobile phone in just three steps. This version allows you to choose one of these three editing modes: wizard (it has four steps), advanced (you can edit or create components) and XML editor (you can use your programming skills to edit the code)

This software application is available in English, and the OS requirements are quite simple: Symbian/J2ME. You can personalise your mobile phone like you would make changes on your desktop computer. It is easy to use, it has an user-friendly interface and I think you can successfully use it to reflect your mood in the mobile's look.