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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."
no touchscreen, less shiny then a iphone. lame...
you guessed it - they are super shy about THAT detail
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
From my limited experience with them... the sony phones are the only ones who's music player actually is intuitive and works like a music player, rather than just some app they stuck on a phone. On that particular issue, I'd say they are standing on pretty good ground.
In terms of whats out there now the Nokia N95 has raised the bar coniderably for feature heavy handsets (though the iPhone has forced things along too, at least in the personal world). Playing leapfrog/catchup with this is a must do for all handset manafacturers wanting a share of the upper end of the market. In addition it is incredibly usable as a phone (though the focus on the camera is a bit iffy).
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
I have a K750i since nearly 2 years now and use the device to sync it to my calendar. It is only capable of syncing up to 300 entries! Allthough the device has ~100MB of memory. My question to sony was answered that all their phones (except the business line) can handle only up to 300 calendar entries-> totaly useless for me now.
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
I'm guessing that because it is SE they don't use the commmon types of memory cards (SD, uSD) but use the Sony type. This is negative points, but what about a standard 3.5" stereo jack? And how about a standard mini-USB port which can be used to charge the unit, and which support USB 'mass storage' (or whatever it is called).
I find it a bit bizarre that Nokia used to be terrible on this count, but has now become much better. HTC on the other hand, has gone in the opposite direction.