Sep 09, 2007 09:16 PM
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I recently sold my SE W700i phone. Purchased it in December 2006. Although there was nothing wrong with this phone somewhere down the line I have this “bad” habit of changing cell phones frequently. I will not go into the technical details since it already has been mentioned in most of the reviews and hence I will mention almost all details of what a person should be aware of when he/she goes to buy a cell phone. This review of mine will not be like the previous 115 reviews that I have written before but I have been reading quite some reviews of W700i and hence thought to pen down my opinion about the phone and also the plusses and minuses. So here goes.
Pluses
The biggest plus of this phone is the music. Megabass is just amazing once you have the earphones on. The sound clarity is amazing and you also have a 5 band equalizer which you can adjust according to your listening requirement.
Camera is 2 MP camera with flashlight and shutter. So you don’t have to worry about the scratches on the camera since it is very much protected. There is a spring mechanism by which you can open the camera shutter. The flashlight is very bright. You can use it as a torch. Also there are in-built options for flashlight like on, off, SOS etc. You can take pics in Cybershot style with the dedicated camera click key at the side as well.
The display is 262 colors crisp and eye catching. Menu is neatly designed, typical Sony Ericsson menu style. Icons are animated. You also have a Sony Ericsson setup wizard incase you find it difficult to use it for the first time.
There is a menu option for music mode and normal mode. In music mode you will have access only to the music player (and camera; Now this is a bug in the fone. I will tell you how to access camera in the music mode), so your phone is not actually on the network. This is good when you are at places where mobile phone usage is not permitted. (Note: This is not Flight Mode since in Flight Mode you can have access to normal phone functions such as reading msgs, taking notes etc only your phone is not on the network).
There is a dedicated Walkman key in the middle and also special dedicated keys for volume and zoom in/out and for the camera at the side.
The phone is small and light weight and it looks pretty much sexy in the titanium gold color. In the initial stages I was worried about its durability but then the phone had slipped twice or thrice from my hand from a considerable height and it escaped without any trouble.
Considering that is available now for around 8,500 it’s a great phone to own for all those who want a combination of music and camera.
One major plus for this phone is the it has Bluetooth, infrared as well as USB. All three work very well and you can use them with ease. Also while transferring files you can see the data size being transferred, a facility not available on Nokia phones.
Different Profiles are also available which can be customized to a certain extent. The silent mode can be easily activated by the “#” sign. Now this silent mode is customized for each profile. For eg if you select home profile and then set silent mode through short cut it will be only for that particular profile which is pretty useful. Also in the silent mode when you have the earphones on you will get to hear the tone in the earphone.
Radio is also present which a useful tool for passing time. Speaker volume is loud in the radio and reception is pretty decent as well.
Minuses:
For all the SMS junkies this phone will disappoint. The fone has the capacity to store only 200 msgs that too combined of drafts, sent items, outbox etc etc. So be ready to delete SMS’s once you reach the storage capacity of around 90%.
Camera although takes awesome pics, you have to click a pic with a still hand else it will get blurred. Also you will have to keep the camera in the same posture once you click the pic else the picture will be blurred. Night mode is not at all useful, the flashlight does not help much so be rest assured that you wont be able to talk good pics in night. Video mode also is not satisfactory.
Very very limited applications available for the phone. This is basically a Java based phone so you wont get much applications to download for your phone. A file explorer is available called Moby Explorer which allows you to encrypt/decrypt files but that’s not much useful since the software is not user friendly.
The icons won’t be changing with the themes you download. But one good thing about the themes is you can directly send the “thm” files (i.e. the theme files to another Sony fone).
Coming to the Walkman, once you transfer songs you will have to manually add the songs in the playlist. You won’t get an option of refreshing the music library and adding new songs. So be prepared to do some tit-bit work here. But its not much of a pain when you know where you are storing the songs.
Multiple applications won’t be running on this phone since there is no Application Switch button which is present on other SE fones just above the joystick. Yes but you can listen to music while doing other stuff like reading messages, playing games etc.
Coming to reminders when you set a reminder for example a birthday you will just get a simple beep nothing else and you are bound to miss it if u do not have a habit of looking at your phone time and again.
For all the Nokia users, you have different profiles which you can set for your phone. But the glitch here is you wont be able to set a different ringtone for each profile. There will be a common ringtone for all the profiles.
The speaker volume is low compared to other walkman phones. But surprisingly the ringtones will be loud enough to hear it even in the most crowded places. So be rest assured of not missing any calls.
All in all this is what I can maximum recall about my W700i. among the above stated points I know many of us wont even bother checking out these things but since I have the habit of analyzing the phone in every possible way I had to highlight these points to all the prospective buyers of this phone.
My opnion:
If you are a die hard music fan and camera junkie you can easily buy this phone. It’s a budget buy with the features it offers. When I had bought this phone for around 10,500 bucks its closest competitior was the 3G Nokia 6233, but this fone certainly has an edge over it. So it’s a good buy overall. Wont disappoint you by any means.
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