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We got our hands on SE’s dedicated gaming handset, the F305. It’s a low-endish slider with a 2 inch large screen. Its resolution is 176×220 pixels and it shows up to 262.144 colours.

Other features include a 2 megapixel camera (unfortunately said camera lacks both auto focus and any light) and an accelerometer for motion based gaming.

Take the jump for more information and pictures.

The build quality if our unit is pretty solid. The slider isn’t wobbly at all, everything fits. There’s been a problem with the display glass falling off, but that seems to be a singularity with this special unit, we never heard of similar problems from other users.

The retail package includes a second battery cover, a wrist strap (so you won’t throw your phone against the wall while bowling) and a pretty poor headset, the HPM-60.

Turning on the F305 is quite disappointing. As the phone is not a Sony Ericsson, but a Sagem license product, the user interface is neither A1/A100 nor A2/A200, but something below that is building on the OS of the absolute low enders like T280 or T303.

So you’ll find yourself with a phone that can’t use themes. A phone that can’t fast forward or rewind while playing a song. A phone that does not support multitasking.

On the positive side, we can mention the 11 pre-installed games, some of them based on the motion sensor, plus the additional 50 games ready to install on the 512 MB large memory stick (M2).

Bowling or fishing with your mobile as the remote is quite a lot of fun, once you got how to use it.

The F305 supports two keypad lighting modes, one for normal use and one for the game mode.

There’s a bug with the lighting, though. Once you entered the games’ list, the lighting switches. When you enter a game, exit and go back to the menu, the keypad will stay off. You’ve to lock and unlock the phone to get it back to normal.

I’ll leave you with these impressions and the clear statement:

If you bought SE phones because you love the UI, don’t buy this.
You’d be disappointed. I was.

/xell.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 4:37 pm and is filed under f-series, preview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.