Feature

Sony Ericsson keeps it up

Sony Ericsson’s latest round of handset launches was more of the same, really, only better. Which is what we’ve come to expect from Sony Ericsson.
At the bottom end are four new candybars with moderate specs but good looks. The J110 is the most basic, a positively retro candybar. The K200 and K220 are cameraphones; the K220 and the The J120 version includes an integrated FM radio and comes with a headset.

Also entry-level are the K200 and K220 cameraphones; again, the K220 is the model with FM radio and headset.

Then there’s a couple of Cyber-shot cameraphones – 4.5m of them shipped since the launch of the K790/K800 last summer, incidentally. The K550 is a mid-range successor to the K510 with a lovely 2in screen displaying 262K colours, 2mp camera with autofocus and a brilliant two-LED flash, and quadband GSM – all in a package just 14mm thick.

The K550 is available now. There’s a variant called the K550im which support i-mode – the first Cyber-shot phone to do so.

Similarly, the K810 is an upgrade for the K800 model. It retains triband GSM and 3G support, and has the same a 3.2mp Cyber-shot camera with auto focus and a Xenon flash. It’s a lot slimmer, though, and the active lens cover has been refashioned so that it doesn’t stick out from the body of the phone. There’s a Photo Fix application for optimising brightness and contrast automatically on snaps; we’d like to try that.

The star of this round of Sony Ericsson launches is probably the W880, the slimmest Sony Ericsson phone yet (just 9.4mm thick) with support for 3G and triband GSM. We reviewed this last month and rated it highly.

But don’t ignore the other new Walkman phone, the W610 – a quadband/EDGE handset with full music phone capabilities plus 2mp camera with autofocus, FM radio with RDS, Bluetooth with A2DP profile and a Memory Stick Micro slot with a 512MB memory card provided. It should be available this quarter.


 W610: quadband Walkman

 
K810: 3G plus 3.2mp camera