Mar 21, 2006 11:54 AM
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(Updated Mar 21, 2006 11:54 AM)
After 10 months with my K700i ...i was looking for a mobile with different form factor, better camera and good music capabilties in the range of Rs. 12K.
After looking at Nokia 6630, Samsung X700, Philips 768, Sagem X8 I decided to exceed my budget by 1000 Rs and get a Sony Ericsson W550i , the
cheapest walkman phone till date and the other competitors in this range are candy bar phones. So How does this Orange Swivel Master is performing
after 2 weeks in my possesion is as follows,
As a Phone : G.O.O.D
With the swivel closed it is the same size of K700i with the extra thickness and the loop antenna at the top. Some may like it some dont 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.D
The 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.D
As 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. 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 PEN drive and just copy the music. The phone
is also complemented with FM radio and you can plug your favourite 3.5 mm headphone. And now videos can be viewed through media player in full
screen landscape mode.
As a Camera : G.O.O.D
The 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 friends
6630 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.D
Th 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. The only
drawback is that it doesnt have EDGE.
Customisation : V.E.R.Y G.O.O.D
The 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 myw550.lasyk.net .
The 3D java games are lot of fun and you can find many more according to your liking. Other useful java applications include Worldtime and
Unit converter.
