Looney tunes - Review Sony Walkman W705 Phone

I wanted to live with the Sony Ericsson W705 walkman phone for a couple of weeks before sitting down to write a review. Finally, I have spent my time with the phone and here is the review.

For starters, it is a great looking phone, but I had some trouble getting the Sim card and battery in without reading the manual. I had to give the manual a good read before getting this right.

The phone comes preloaded with a 4GB M2 Card. But since none of my laptops, or even card readers, take an M2 card, it was a bit of a pain to transfer music to it. Anyway, the phone supports Mass Storage Mode allowing you to connect your phone over USB as if it was a pen drive.

Sony, which still uses propreitory ports for USBs, headsets and chargers, now has a charger with a double-side port so that users can connect the headphone/USB and charger together. But you still need a convertor to use the 3.5-mm jack of your favourite headphone.

Another negative is that if an SMS lands while you are listening to music, your music goes into the background till you press a button to read or ignore the message. Though I agree calls should get priority, I found this very irritating, especially on a walkman phone.

The speakerphone is pretty much useless. Though the speaker has great voice quality, the microphone is really bad. The speaker too, though loud and clear, is awkwardly positioned on the back of the phone. Sony, like the iPhone, could have built the speakers at the bottom edge of the phone

The camera is good despite the bad focus. It even has some nice features like geotagging using Google Maps, if you have GPRS, that is.

I was, however, very happy with the battery time. I took the phone to Jaipur without the charger. It worked till the third day, even with my calls, the odd snap in between and taps on the calculator.

The phone has an accelerometer built-in allowing motion gaming. This version appeared a bit immature, and some refinements will do the phone a world of good. Moreover, I had to keep the slider open to play the built-in bowling game with motion gaming, giving the impression that the phone would fly off from my hand.

This phone has some great connectivity options like WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, and even 3G. But, sadly, you still have to rely on GPRS to update phone software. It also supports Microsoft Exchange connectivity and SyncML to synchronise your phone with your office contacts server. Another good feature is the WiFi sharing that enable you to share files with the PC and browse the phone from you computer.

Overall, I thought the phone was a bit too costly at Rs 17,786.

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The Above article appeared in The Indian Express, on Sunday 12th April 2009