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Sony Ericsson Shows Off Feature-Heavy Cell Phones
An anonymous reader writes "As if waiting until the end of the month for the iPhone wasn't bad enough, Sony Ericsson has announced a set of super phones due to come out later this year. The Sony Ericsson K850i features an impressive 5-megapixel camera with auto-focus and xenon flash, while the W960i comes with a whopping 8GB of on-board memory, stereo Bluetooth, 3G and Wi-Fi connectivity, and a 3.2-megapixel camera. These were among several other new devices Ericsson unveiled recently, in hopes feature-heavy offerings will put it firmly back on the camera and music phone map."
shiny is a fucked idea for a finish, as shiny finishes are the FIRST to get all scratched up
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Do they actually WORK as a phone?
Fuck the features. Does it get good reception and decent range? Can it survive being dropped, mishandled, weather etc? Does it actually last for more than 18 months? Can I hear you properly....?
Mobiles these days jut have too much crap and not enough just plain phone.
There's lots of possible devices out there, with lots of functionality. Some functionality is very important to me, while other is nice to have but not really important. And the lack of "pocket real estate" - the amount of devices I am able and willing to carry - is a very powerful limiting factor.
So, important functionality - for me, camera and electronic dictionary - are important enough for me to warrant their own devices. I am willing to sacrifice precious space in order to get the best possible function in these areas. It means carrying a DSLR in a small pack, and having a separate Casio dictionary.
Other functions are nice and I would not want to be without them, but they're not so important that I want to give up precious space for it. For me it includes things like a sound player and radio (covered by my mobile phone), GPS (I have one that I never bring along), text reader (dictionary), web surfing (phone). These functions need to be built in another device or I end up not using them (but still missing them if I lack it).
Of course, what constitutes essential and what is optional differs from person to person. You listen to music all the time, and just take the occasional snapshot? Get a iPod or other real player and just use the phonecam instead of getting a "real" camera that ends up gathering dust at home. Fortunately, many of these functions are low-cost addons to existing devices, and doesn't hurt a user that wants to be without. Besides, there's low-end phones and other stuff out there for those that absolutely do not want to be saddled with it. Notably, for all that people complain about all those extras, basic models just never sell well when a manufacturer actually tries to listen to the complaints.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Note that 8GB is "whopping" for an Erricson, yet many people complain 8GB is "paltry" for the iPhone, and a reason to skip buying one...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
well if we take my SE W810i as representative, the battery life will probably be superb. Steve Jobs once said Sony was a company Apple shoould try to be more like. It's a shame he stopped listening to his own common sense as SE's phones are lovely, and the combination of a fast operating system and easy to use keyboard & pointer/clicker makes it simple to do many tasks without looking at the screen at all - which is something of which the iPhone will never be capable
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
xenon flash (which is the biggest improvement to the camera, letting you take actually useful photos in darkness)
"Useful" in the mugshot or coroner's report sense of the word. Yeah, you can see the detail of your girlfriend's face in the photo you took at the party, but she looks like a bloodless corpse in a rictus of horror.
A built-in flash is OK for taking "useful" photos of stuff, but not good photos.
It's not so much about how many features there are but the quality and design of the radio chip. Most of the power goes to constantly poll and communicate with the base station, unless you really call a lot each day. Sony Ericsson has been traditionally best in battery life, Japanese and Korean manufacturers have been worst, especially bad battery life is on Samsungs.
If they were normal in size, I'd agree. But mobile phone keys are crying to be put to death for quite some time.
is all the DRM that these phones are going to have.
Actually Sony Ericsson make great phones. The OS is fast, looks good and is intuitive. Before my SE W850i I'd always used Nokias. My previous Nokia though, the N73 was absolutely attrocious - slow, crashed daily, confused menu system. I actually paid full price for the SE and dropped the N73 in the trash (literally) as it was so bad. There's no way I'll buy the locked-down iPhone, I'll be sticking with SE from now on unless they follow Nokia's path...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
"Shiny" We are all raccoons because we like shiny things!
So you go and pay so many extra $$s to get your nice "shiny" cell phone with all of the "shiny" extra features, and you realize that you are going to replace it within two years. (Actually 2 years seems to be on the outside.)
Why do you want to pay so much extra for a disposable camera and music player? That is what it really is. I see some great small MP3 players for really cheap and a real digital camera takes way better pictures and both of them last a lot longer.
I realize that as an uber geek you must have as many electronic functions packed in your pocket at one time as possible but have you considered that you are going to end up paying way over $2000 in a span of ten years? For way less money you could have a GREAT digital camera and a GREAT MP3 player. Then all you would need is a series of cheap cell phones because you are going to dispose of them regularly anyway.
Why on every mobile phone story do we have to have so many 'insightful' comments complaining that the phone covered in the story has too many features.
If you want a phone that makes calls, and does SMS, there are loads to choose from. Take the world's most popular phone, the Nokia 1100, with over 200 million sold worldwide. Excellent at making calls, sending text messages, brilliant battery life, and the only extra feature being a handy torch. And it'll cost you about £20 in the UK, without a contract, with £10 call time thrown in.
So leave those of us who use our phone for more than making calls to our gadget phones, you can buy the same basic and solid phones that you've always been able to buy.
The Nokia N95 has built in GPS, 5 megapixel camera, capable of recording near DVD quality video at 30 FPS, full support for 3rd party applications (such as Doom, multiplayer capable via Bluetooth) and so on.
;)
The only thing these phones don't have is touch screen, but I'd question whether it's really that great to have, afaik they haven't go round the problem of greasy finger-prints making you need to clean screen every 5 seconds problem with them yet.
The reality is, compared to offerings like this and like Nokia's offerings the iPhone looks really dated, 2 megapixel camera? no GPS? no 3rd party apps?, what's more the iPhone is actually even heavier than the N95! The iPhone is essentially, to us Europeans/Asians at least the kind of thing we'd have expected at the low end of the market around 3 - 4 years ago, as an example I used to have a Nokia 7650 around 5 years ago, other than the things that improve with age, such as screen quality, megapixels on camera, memory this phone actually still did more than the iPhone can out the box, it could also still run Doom at full speed such that it was perfectly playable.
So again, I ask where does the iPhone actually fit in? It's a low end phone with a high end price, the only people over here I can imagine buying it are those that want a phone that interacts well with their Apple hardware, which isn't exactly the biggest target demographic to aim for! Still, I guess I shouldn't speak too soon, the iPod was extremely feature-crippled compared to other portable audio players yet I still fell into the trap of buying one so maybe the Apple hype machine will pull the wool over our eyes once more
Because "portable wireless communication and data retrieval device" takes way too long to say.
"Cell phone" was what they were called first and the name just stuck. When you "dial" someone's number, you may not use an actual rotary dial, but you certainly use the word. I'm "typing" this response, but it doesn't mean I'm lining up little wooden blocks with letters carved in to them. Language rarely evolves as quickly as technology.