Jan 31
Music phones are becoming a rage in the market now, and the Sony Ericsson W550i / W600i has lots going for it not only in the music department but also in the style , phone department.
- As a Phone : G.O.O.DWith the swivel closed it is the same size of Sony Ericsson K700i with the extra thickness and the loop antenna at the top. Some may like it some don’t, but at 120 grams it is comfortable to hold and talk. Even though newbies will find the swivel mechanism somewhat confusing you will be able to pick up in a few days and the keypad is comfortable to type in and the D-Pad is also easy to use. Phone is equipped with a 1000 memory phone book and after a long time SE has given birthday reminders as a special field in the address book. Pictures and ringtones can be customized for every person. Battery talk time and standby time seems to be much better than K700i.Sound through the speakerphone is bit soft.
- For Messaging : V.E.R.Y G.O.O.DThe User Interface is tweaked a bit more from the K700i and is very user friendly. The D-Pad can be customized to have shortcuts. Messaging is a breeze with T9….from SMS, MMS to E-Mail everything is easy to use. For E-Mail we can set up our POP3 accounts to send and receive e-mail. MMS settings can be downloaded from the SE website for your Service provider. Message and GPRS data counters helps to keep track of the same.Now Message tones can be customized with our own MP3 tones.
- MUSIC : V.E.R.Y G.O.O.DAs the famous brand name ’WalkMan’ suggests it is a Perfect music phone slighlty marred only by its limited memory capacity without the option for extending the memory using a memory Stick. Otherwise the Music Player lets you create playlists and with its MegaBass and Stereo Widening effects will blow away any other flash based MP3 player or any other music phone for that matter. The dedicated music button and Music mode lets you use it as standalone MP3 player. Transferring music is easy as using the USB cable provided along with the phone turns it into a USB mass storage device ala USB drive and just copy the music. The phone is also complemented with FM radio and you can plug your favourite 3.5 mm headphones. And now videos can be viewed through media player in full screen landscape mode. The music can run in the background whereby you will be free to do other tasks in the phone.
- As a Camera : G.O.O.DThe 1.3 Megapixels camera works as though it is a cybershot digicam in the landscape mode with extensive settings for White balance and Night mode.Video can also be recorded limited only by the memory capacity. Camera performance is good in outdoor sunny conditions and comparing it to my friends6630 the performance was almost the same. For fun there are photo frames, a Photo Editor and a Video Editor to play around with the pictures and videos.
- Connectivity : G.O.O.DThe phone comes with a USB cable as well as IR and bluetooth for wireless transfers. For Internet there is GPRS and there is inbuilt NetFront HTML browser to browser HTML sites but its capability is limited as it cant open large pages. But we can work around that by using Opera Mini and for a mini review on it please look at this post here. The only drawback is that it doesnt have EDGE which is present is SE W600i.
- Customisation : V.E.R.Y G.O.O.DThe phone comes with a extra panel so that you can change the color of your phone as you wish but the original style-up covers are little costly. And like many other SE phones themes is a fantastic way to customize the phone with extra support for Flash Lite. Pictures, Themes and Ringtones (MP3,AAC) can be downloaded easily onto the phone and make your phone look different. For a start look at http://myw550.lasyk.net .
The 3D java games are lot of fun and you can find many more according to your liking.And the dedicated gaming buttons make it look and play like a gaming console. Other useful java applications include Worldtime and Unit converter.Note: SE W550i & W600i are exactly same except for 850 Mhz band and EDGE support in W600i.
At the current market price of 210 U.S$ (Rs. 9500) it has stiff competition from Nokia 5200,3230, Samsung X700, Moto RAZR V3i, Sagem My501X, SE’s own W300i but teens / college Dudes & Dudettes / Party goers looking for a C-O-O-L Mobile should seriously consider this.
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