Archive for June, 2008

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 hands on

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

X1

The folks at Boy Genius Report have managed to get their hands on the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1.  So what’s their verdict?  Right from the 800×480 VGA screen, optical joystick, speedy HSDPA , the device impresses, and  you really can’t throw any more specs in! With looks to die for, its not surprising that the X1 is the  #1 Windows Mobile device people are waiting for.  Their Sony Ericsson X1 gallery doesn’t have any shots of the Panel interface, so for now you’ll have to make do with some shots of the nice looking exteriors of the device.

Xperia X1 gallery

Sony Ericsson C905 black live photos

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

These live photos of the black version of the upcoming Sony Ericsson C905 have just been posted at the Arabic Sony Ericsson fan site, SE4M.com. I quite like the look of it, although it seems fairly thick and a bit heavy, at almost 20 millimetres in thickness and 136 grams on the weight scales.

Source: SE4M forums

HBH-PV-715 / 720 / 740 Bluetooth headsets

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

Sony Ericsson – the brains behind Bluetooth, however self-centered that may sound – is planning to announce three awesome-looking Bluetooth headsets on the 17th this month. These three all offer superior battery life and – in my opinion – look very slick.

They’ve all got some features in common. These are up to 800 hours of battery life in standby mode (that’s over a month of battery life!) or up to 11 hours of talk, auto-pairing, digital noise reduction (DSP), auto volume-leveling, removable ear-hooks, as well as Bluetooth 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rates (EDR) for a faster and more stable connection.

HBH-PV-715 seems to be the cheapest of the three, and is – once again, in my opinion – the better looking of the bunch as well. It’ll come in either the pictured white trimming or a black one.

HBH-PV-720 is the headset for the more sophisicated and fashionable of us. You can personalize its look with StyleUp covers, and it comes with a pouch and a silver necklace.

HBH-PV-740 is the professional headset for the business man or woman. It’s the only one of the headsets to feature a status display, and it’s the only one to come with a headset desk stand and USB charger. Apart from that, you also get the silver necklace with the HBH-PV-740.

No word on availablity or price on these ones, although the price will probably be in the range of £60 – £100.

Sony Ericsson S302 for your snapshots

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

We told you about the Snapshot series quite some time ago in a post about the new nomenclature of Sony Ericsson phone names, and today we’ll be unveiling Sony Ericsson’s first phone in this series – it’s called the Sony Ericsson S302 Snapshot.

The S302 Snapshot is a cheap camera-enabled quadband GSM phone with further support for EDGE networks. It’ll be available in Europe (S302) and China (S302c).

The S302 Snapshot sports a fair 2 mega pixel camera with fixed focus, meaning your shots won’t get past the snapshot-level, which is basically expectable from a product with that as its surname. It does, however, feature the more advanced camera interface from earlier Sony Ericsson phones, and considering it’s a low/mid-end solution, that’s not half bad. Further more, it’s got a photo light and it features PhotoFix as well, if you decide to use that.
Your favourite moments can be recorded on video, although it won’t be in that great quality, and the internal memory of only 20 megabytes is also somewhat of a hindrance if you had plans about holding your entire photo album on it. It is, however, expandable with a Memory Stick Micro card.

Photos and videos can be easily transfered via either Bluetooth 2.0 or USB 2.0 (notice the 2’s, did you?). If you don’t want to use either, you can post both your images on a blog, or print them directly with the built-in PictBridge support.

Other features worth mentioning are A2DP-support, media player, support for various audio codecs, PlayNow, TrackID, a built-in FM radio and the Access NetFront xHTML web browser.

The S302 Snapshot measures 101 x 46 x 11 (12) millimetres, and weighs a mere 79 grams, making it quite light. Its display is a 2-inch TFT-display with a resolution of 176 x 220 pixels. The battery life is set to 7 hours of talk or 300 hours of standby.

The phone will be available in early Q4 this year, and announced on the 17th. It’ll come in Thunder Grey and Crystal Blue colour trimmings. Its price is yet unknown, but it’ll be quite low.

Sony Ericsson F305 is for fun and games

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

The Sony Ericsson F305 is Sony Ericsson’s first Motion Gaming-enabled phone. Or well, no, that’s actually not true, but it’s the first to go by that name in particular. It’s a quad-band GSM phone with support for EDGE network speeds.

This low/mid-level phone sports some rather cool gaming features. The three pre-loaded games – Bowling, Bass fishing & Jockey – will enable you to use movements to play the game. Say, you load up the bowling game – how do you play it? Simply imitate the movement of the bowling ball throw with the F305, and you’ll be playing the game. Simple, isn’t it? It’s a bit like the concept behind Nintendo Wii, although I find it hard to believe this will work just as great as the Wii does. Other than the special gaming features, the F305 offers a set of PlayStation-like gaming keys just above the display, as well as a shortcut key to your games. If you’re in the middle of a game, but the battery is running low (meaning you’ve played almost 8 hours!), you can quickly plug in the battery Power Pack CCP-100 (extra accessory), and you can play for hours again. That’s actually a rather clever accessory, and I hope it’ll be available for other phones, although there’s a chance that won’t happen.

F305 features loud stereo speakers on the back of it, making your gaming experience even better. If you feel like challenging a friend of yours in a match, you can do this via Bluetooth on some games.

F305 has got a decent music player capable of playing the most standard audio compression codecs, including the über-compressed eAAC+ codec. The phone memory is a bit limited though at only 10 megabytes, so you’ll have to expand the memory with a Memory Stick Micro card. Your music can then be transfered via a USB connection. You can stream your music wireless in stereo, as the phone features the Bluetooth A2DP profile. You can also have a listen to the radio with the built-in FM radio, and recognize the music playing with TrackID.

The display on the front of this Polar White or Mystic Black phone is a 2-inch large TFT display with a resolution of 176 x 220 pixels, and up to 262.144 colours. While the resolution isn’t exactly excellent, it’ll make the rendering of 3D games quicker, and more games are available for phones of this screen resolution.

The F305 measures a good 96 x 47 x 14.6 millimetres, and weighs in at just 97.5 grams, making it a bit heavier than it actually looks. F305 will be out in selected markets in Q3 this year. We expect the price tag to be relatively low, considering this is a low/mid-end phone.

The F305 will be officially announced on Tuesday 17th.

Video: Sony Ericsson “Alicia” demo tour

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

Here’s the demo tour video of the upcoming “Alicia” by Sony Ericsson. The outside display(s) look really nice. Thanks to Phoner for uploading the video.

YouTube Preview Image

Sony Ericsson C905 full size camera samples!

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Press the photos below for the full size ones. This is still prototype software, and the colours have not yet been dealt with, but the quality KICKS ASS, DUDES! I can feel Nokia, LG & Samsung shaking their pants right now. Sony Ericsson is on top, long live the king of mobile photography!

[thanks point0 and Phoner]

Video: Sony Ericsson C905 Demo Tour

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Thanks to Phoner at Esato, here’s the demo tour video of the Sony Ericsson C905 :) Looks awesome!

YouTube Preview Image

Sony Ericsson C905 Questions & Answers

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

I promised that I’d do a post answering most of the tons of questions asked in the comments of the Sony Ericsson C905 post. So, this is what I’ll be doing in this post. Note, that it’s possible there might be some slight changes in the final production unit.

Q. What kind of phone is this?

A. It’s a quad-band GSM / GPRS / EDGE phone (all versions) with UMTS & HSDPA support in the European version (2100 MHz) and American version (850 / 900 / 2100 MHz). We’re guessing it’s 3.6 Mbps HSDPA.

Q. When will it be available and at what price?

A. It’ll be available in early Q4. We expect the price to be around £400 SIM free.

Q. What’s the camera specifications?

A. It’s an 8.1 mega pixel camera sensor (3264 x 2448 pixels) with auto focus and face recognition, and many more advanced camera features. It’s got a xenon flash for still photos, and a photo flash (the improved one) for videos. Videos are recorded in VGA resolution (640 x 480 pixels) QVGA resolution (320 x 240 pixels). It does not feature optical zoom. The focal length is 5.91 mm, and the aperture is fixed at f/2.8.

Q. What kind of display is it?

A. It’s a 2.4 inch large scratch-resistant TFT display made of mineral glass. The resolution is QVGA (240 x 320 pixels). It can show up to 262.144 colours (18 bit).

Q. Is this a smart phone? What’s the OS?

A. No, this is a feature phone, not running any sort of smart phone operating system. It looks like it’ll run a newly developed OS based on the older A2 platform, although this has not been confirmed.

Q. What’s the web browser in it?

A. Access NetFront.

Q. How much memory does it have?

A. 160 megabytes of internal memory storage, and a 2 gigabyte Memory Stick Micro (M2) comes bundled.

Q. Does it feature W-LAN?

A. Yes, it does, and with further support for DLNA. No details on whether this is 802.11b or 802.11b/g.

Q. Does it feature a 3.5 mm jack port?

A. No, it doesn’t feature a 3.5 mm jack port.

Q. Does it feature mobile TV?

A. You can have TV streamed to the phone via UMTS / HSDPA, but there’s no DVB-H support or alike.

I guess that was it :-)

Video: Sony Ericsson C905

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

Here’s a video slide of some leaked live photos of the C905. Credits goes to whomever leaked these / the site they’re from. Sorry, we have no idea, other than they were posted at Esato. Edit / Thanks to Phoner.

YouTube Preview Image

Looks like there are some problems at YouTube, so you’ll have to wait a bit longer for it to be processed, I’m afraid. Now trying again for the third time…