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."

Comments

lame

[DohnJoe]

no touchscreen, less shiny then a iphone. lame...

Re:lame

[JanneM]

no touchscreen

Real keys, in other words, with tactile feedback. Much preferable.

and how much battery life?

[timmarhy]

you guessed it - they are super shy about THAT detail

So the obvious question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Double standard

[SuperKendall]

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...

Re:Convergence = good

[iamdrscience]

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.

Oh really? What about the Nokia 1100, the best selling cellphone in the world with over 200 million sold? It's a very simple, reliable phone with no frills, the screen is even black and white.

Nokia N95

[rishistar]

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).

Nokia has a nice offering too

[Xest]

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 ;)