Camera Phones Plaza

First announced in May of 2006, the W710i is Sony Ericsson's folder style Walkman music phone for the active set. In addition to the typical features found in a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone, it also sports things like an FM radio and a built-in pedometer to keep runners and walkers both entertained and informed.

The folks at mobileburn made a review of this phone and here are some of their impressions. The Sony Ericsson W710i comes equipped with a fixed focus 2 megapixel camera. While the camera has fairly nice features, such as accurate white balance, frames, and a panorama mode, the overall quality of the photos is not quite as good as we have come to expect from Sony Ericsson. The issue seems to be the lens, which takes photos that are not consistently focused. The photos are fine for emailing to friends, just not for making prints. The camera can record videos as well, but they appear to have a fairly low frame rate. The video app supports most of the same features as the camera and also has a microphone muting option.

Like with any Sony Ericsson Walkman branded phone, you can expect a very good music listening experience from the W710i. The large orange colored external display and the surrounding dedicated music controls make playback when the phone is closed very convenient. The main application, accessible when the phone is open, organizes your music just as any good MP3 player would: by playlist, track, and artist. There are a few equalizer settings available to adjust the sound quality, if you like. I was pleased with the quality of the sound overall when the W710i was used with both wired and Bluetooth wireless stereo headphones.

The phone itself has only about 16MB of free built-in memory for photos and songs, but the W710i does have an M2 (Memory Stick Micro) card slot for additional storage space. Our W710i came with a 512MB card included. While it is not necessary to remove the battery to swap memory cards, you do have to remove the rear cover of the device. This shouldn't be a real issue unless you plan on constantly swapping out cards.

The conclusion is that, while I don't consider it to be one of the better looking handsets the company has created, the Sony Ericsson W710i is still a very capable and fun handset to use. It might not have a best in class camera, but the music playback (with stereo Bluetooth support) and the built-in pedometer make it a great companion for commuters and athletically inclined people alike.

If not for some issues with audio quality on calls, I might have been convinced to give the W710i a higher rating, but as is, I instead give it an enthusiastic "Recommended" rating.

Read full review on mobileburn.

Samsung has a new slim phone in the offing. The Samsung SPH-V9900 is all of 6.9mm thin, and it was recently showcased at the KES 2006. This CDMA 2000 cell phone is compatible with 1x EV-DO (1900MHz) for high speed internet access.

The Samsung SPH-V9900 also includes a neat 2 megapixel camera and 1.9" QVGA resolution display. Other goodies on the phone include an MP3 player, video-on-demand and music-on-demand capability and a dictionary.

There's also a file viewer, although it's not clear what formats are supported. No word on pricing or availability yet.

Via aving.net.

Samsung Korea today announced that Cingular will launch a new HSDPA clamshell. The Samsung A707 appears to be based on the Z560 - a thin, light folder launched in Europe earlier this year. In addition to HSDPA high speed data, the A707 has a 2 megapixel camera and stereo Bluetooth. The Z560 featured a QVGA and MicroSD slot, it is likely these features will also carry over to the A707 but they have not been confirmed.

The Samsung A707 features Windows Media DRM and is compatible with Plays For Sure music services such as Napster and Rhapsody. It is possible Cingular will also launch a music download service with this phone as well. It also has music identification software that will find the name and artist of a song when played into the phone.

Via techticker.

T-Mobile USA now offers Nokia 6133 – an elegant and feature-rich clamshell positioned in the middle class. The Nokia 6133 has stylish design with opening-mechanism, combined with a pair of quality color displays. One of them is of QVGA (240x320 pixels) resolution with 16 million colors.

For multimedia-craving customers, the clamshell has a 1.3 megapixel camera with up to 8x digital zoom, and music player, supporting various formats, including MP3 and AAC. A nice feature is the support for stereo music through Bluetooth A2DP profile.

Via mobileguerilla.

Vodafone V1210 is a fully fledged Smartphone and it's coming to Vodafone UK very soon indeed. As with most Vodafone handsets it'll have two names. This is the Vodafone v1210, aka the VPA IV. The FCC, who are responsible for ensuring phones meet safety standards, have pictures and a user manual plus lots more in their report.

The VPA IV looks fairly similar to other HTC handsets and comes with a nippy Intel PXA270 312Mhz CPU, 3G, 128Mb Flash with 64Mb SDRAM, MicroSD expansion slot, Bluetooth, 3.5mm headphone jack and has a fairly sizeable speaker at the back. The screenshots in the user manual show Vodafone UK as the carrier, so us Brits can definitely expect this soon. The Opera web browser seems to be included too, as does the ClearVue suite which will let you check Word / PDF / Powerpoint files on the move.

Via techfresh.