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By Kaloyan Stoychev, 23rd of March 2009.

The C510, as its model name implies, is Sony Ericsson’s most affordable Cyber-shot phone till date. It’s also the first Cyber-shot handset to use the index number 5** and to use the Smile Shutter^TM technology. Fact is, it’s a mid-end handset and although the features may not sound too impressive, it’s really a little gem of a phone. It’s got both the looks and smarts to satisfy your not-too demanding parent or teenager, who wishes only for a tastefully designed phone that can do almost anything else a normal phone can plus a very nice camera. It’s a phone for the masses, really.

You’ll find an answer to almost any question you may have about the C510 in this review, in addition to a plethora of high-quality photos of the handset and images of the interface.

Table of contents

• Design
• User interface
• Organizer
• Applications and location services
• Camera
• Music
• Games
• Web and connectivity
• Contacts
• Messaging
• Calls
• Conclusion

Advantages

• UMTS / HSDPA 2100 (tri-band for the US), up to 3.6 Mbps
• Great design
• Thin and light body
• Smile shutter
• Great price
• Innovative lens cover

Disadvantages

• No HSUPA support
• No xenon flash
• Limited video recording
• Mediocre sound quality
• No USB cable included in the box

Sony Ericsson’s portfolio features many phones with 3.2 megapixel cameras, indeed, but few of them are actually camera-centric. Such are the W890, T700, W980 and even the newly-released W705. Sure, they take good snapshots, but that’s not what they do best. Now, there are others that are designed for taking photos. These are the somewhat outdated K800 and K810 (which nevertheless sport powerful xenon flashes) and last year’s splash- and dust-proof C702. The C510 is in the same league and many people would argue that it’s just a rehash and they would be right to some extent. The C510 is special, though, in its own unique way. It’s elegant, functional and affordable.

The first time you pick up a C510 it’ll amaze you how light it is. And thin! Sure, it’s a tiny bit thicker than a C902, but it manages to impress nevertheless. To be more precise, it measures 107.0 x 47.0 x 12.5 mm – quite adequate dimensions. It slips down your pocket with ease and causes no discomfort at all even in tight jeans (everyone has one of those). The C510 is also pretty solid. There are no creaking parts whatsoever, or at least we haven’t managed to come across any during the testing period. Generally, we’re quite happy with the build quality.

The 2.2″ TFT display that is featured on the front side can display up to 262.144 colours. The borders are flush with the rest of the body, as the screen lies underneath a glass-like plastic cover, along with the rest of the top part of the phone. The display itself is very bright and the colours are vivid and clear. The only problem here is the contrast, as it is with most mid-end phones. Don’t get us wrong, it’s not bad, but let’s just say that the blacks aren’t as dark as on C905’s screen. Legibility under direct sunlight is largely hindered by the screen coating, though.

The alphanumeric keypad is a pleasure to use. While the key spacing and size could have been a tad better, the keys themselves are nicely separated and are slanting towards the screen in order to improve usability. Tactile feedback, as with most candybars, is excellent. The same goes for the softkeys and directional pad. So, generally, only people with large hands could encounter small annoyances while using the buttons on the phone. By the way, the keypad lights up in beige.

The right side of the phone features the volume/zoom rocker and the camera key. The Fast Port connector can be found on the right side along with the Memory Stick Micro slot for hot-swapping memory cards. This time around, though, the Fast Port is near the top, which makes it less obtrusive, especially when there’s something plugged in.

The top and bottom sides feature nothing but an accent stripe in either blue or white, depending on the colour, that goes round the periphery (much like the C902 and K850). Oh, there’s also a lanyard eyelet at the bottom right corner.

The backside, features the familiar Sony Ericsson logo, the speaker grill and the lens cover, which I oh-so adore. Why? Well, first of all, it’s flush with the rest of the backside when closed. It’s also pretty neat when you get to slide it sideways in order to reveal the camera and the LED flash – the feeling is just fantastic. You’ll find yourself opening and closing it occasionally just because it’s so nice. The lens cover definitely wins some design points for the C510, considering its metallic build and classy looks. The back cover, on the other hand, has a nice soft feeling to it when you touch it (a la K810 and C905).

Once opened, the back cover reveals Sony Ericsson’s BST-38 lithium-polymer battery, which has a capacity of 930 mAh. Battery performance is quite average, the phone lasting about 2, maximum 3 days until power levels reach critical percentages. That’s on semi-intensive usage. Quite honestly, it could have been better.

The C510 comes in two colours – Future black and Radiation silver. The first one is mostly black with blue and silver accents, while the second is white with beige-ish accents. Both look pretty nice.
Later this year we’ll see a third colour version – a red and white one.

One thing that we aren’t too happy about the C510 is that it doesn’t come with a USB cable. That’s a big let-down. Sure, it’s in order to bring the total cost of the handset down, but that’s pretty a basic thing that need to ship with every modern phone. People, who’ve owned previous Sony Ericsson probably won’t have any problem with this, though.

Albeit we didn’t receive a Memory card with our test unit, the phone should most probably ship with a 1 gigabyte one, depending on your region.

The C510 uses Sony Ericsson’s proprietary OS – more specifically the A2 version. In my opinion, though, it should be called something likeA2.5 in the C510, because it has been improved many times since the release of the K850 and W910. It sports an updated JAVA platform and Flash lite version, new menu icons and animations, an expanded media menu, a YouTube player, a revised structure of some of the menus and Conversation messaging – those are just from the top of my head. The interface itself is with no doubt one of the most intuitive out there.

As I said, the UI is very easy to use and probably won’t leave you browsing through the manual to find how to access a feature/setting. It’s also very speedy. There’s no lag at all. Really. Well, maybe some of the transition effect in some of the flash menus may slow you down with a fraction of the second, but it’s hardly irritating.

Like on virtually any Sony Ericsson phone, the appearance of the interface can be customized with the use of themes. The phone comes preloaded with 6 of them. Five are flash themes – such that involve the use of flash lite animations and effect on the standby screen and the main menu.

The first one is the Clarity theme that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on every Sony Ericsson phone. The second one is called Dusk setting – a rather dark theme, the standby wallpaper of which visualises tree silhouettes moving sideways on a twilight background. The second one – Morning glisten – features mostly whitish colours and a standby glisten animation. The Ray theme has blue laser beams fading in and out at different places on the screen. The Track flow theme shows square frames forming waves on standby and in the main menu. And lastly, we have the Cyber-shot theme with a slideshow wallpaper.
Fun facts: Every theme besides the Clarity and Cyber-shot themes has flash menus. The Dusk setting and Morning glisten themes were on the C905 as well. The Ray and Track flow themes involve keypad light effects, similar to the T650 themes, and special animations while the phone is charging. All flash themes except for Ray and Cyber-shot have wallpapers that are controlled by the accelerometer of the phone.

Ray and Dusk setting flash lite menus

The main menu has four different view styles: the normal grid view, the carousel view (icons switch horizontally) and the single icon view (icons switch vertically), in addition to the Flash menu view, if available. Every one of these are beautifully animated and feature either colourful generic icons or stylized flash ones.

The Media menu is another important part of the interface. It’s a place where you have access to all your pictures, music, videos, games and web feeds. It’s full with eye-candy animations and transitions and is actually pretty speedy. It can also be auto-rotated, the response being instant. This menu also houses the photo gallery, as mentioned. It’s very intuitive and smart, as, for instance, it allows you to tag photos, play instant slideshows with different themes and edit pictures via PhotoDJ (videos can be created with VideoDJ and ringtones – with MusicDJ).

A very central feature of the interface of most Sony Ericsson phones is the Activity menu. It’s basically a pop-up menu that shows you all your recent events, favourite sites, menu shortcuts and running apps. You could think of it as the Sony Ericsson equivalent of the Windows taskbar/Mac OS X dock. It’s pretty handy, no doubt. It enables both multitasking and fast access to frequently used features and can be brought up from anywhere in the interface.

I’d also like to mention that the right softkey now brings up a Google search menu on standby, instead of being a shortcut to contacts. While some people may find that useful, I think that the majority would rather have an option to change the behaviour of the shortcut.

Sony Ericsson’s feature phones have probably one of the best organizers on the mobile phone market. They are comprehensive in features and easy to use.

The first item in the Organizer menu is the File manager. As its name implies, it allows you to browse the file structure on your phone memory and memory card. It’s really one of the most powerful file browsers out there, as it allows users to copy, paste/move, delete or even send multiple items at once, sort files by name, date, file and size and rename items right on the phone. New folders can be created as well. You can also view memory status info from there.

The calendar on the phone is very handy. It gives you the opportunity to save detailed appointments and reminders (including birthday ones) and to review your week in detail. There’s even an option which enables you to find a specific event in your schedule. The calendar can be synchronised via SyncML or Microsoft Exchange.

The calculator is quite simple. The omission of a square root function makes it even more so – in a bad way. Thankfully, Sony Ericsson has decided to incorporate a unit converter into the app, which makes converting mass, length, area, temperature and volume units easy as pie.

Additionally, there are apps for taking down tasks with reminders and notes, which can even be put on standby. A sync option, a stopwatch, a timer and a code memo app are available as well. Strangely enough, the Video Call option is in this menu.

The phone comes preloaded with 4 applications, in addition to Google maps. There should have been a bit more, if you ask me.

AccuWeather – Neat weather application that can keep you updated on the weather all around the globe. The application features 3-day forecasts, including temperatures and wind speeds.

Photo Mate – A photo application that tells you about the basics of photography and how to use some of the special photo features of the C510.

World Clock 3D – A 3-dimensional world globe that shows the time (including time zone) and date of all the countries of the world.

YouTube – Well, I think that’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s an app that enables you to watch YouTube videos on the phone, without going to m.youtube.com, although the experience is basically the same. There’s also a shortcut for it in the Media menu.

Unlike these programs, which are located in the Applications menu, the Google maps client resides in the Location services menu, which in turn is in Entertainment, strangely enough. Google maps can pinpoint your position on satellite images, using your mobile connection, as the C510 lacks a GPS module. It’s still fairly accurate, though. You can also search for places around the world and save them in Favourites.

The camera of the C510 can shoot pictures of a maximum 3.2 megapixel resolution. That’s nothing new, surely? Well, in a way, yes. But still there are some niceties that make C510’s photo-shooting capabilities something to be excited about.

One of them is the rather unique lens cover. It moves horizontally and thanks to its special sliding mechanism, doesn’t need space to the side, but is rather flush with the back cover when closed. Thing is, the lens cover tilts up and slides over it to reveal the camera lens and LED flash (along with a glossy coloured finish). As I’ve already mentioned in the review, I’m pretty fond of this innovative implementation. But there’s a trick to opening it, though. You shouldn’t try and push the whole surface of the cover, but just the far edge and it will slide effortlessly.

The LED flash itself is used as a focus assist light, as a photo flash and as a video light. Its luminance can be rather blinding when the person who is taking the picture is focusing. Despite that, the results cannot be compared to those from a xenon flash. Night pictures are pretty much unusable not that great. They’re fuzzy thanks to the noise-reducing post-processing algorithms, but the noise is still far from gone. Colours are kind of off as well. Even when using the photo light, the exposure is inadequate. The subject also needs to stand still if you don’t want a smeary photo. That’s why, in my opinion, the flash is best used as a video light.

Daylight pictures, on the other hand, are very good. They’ve got pretty natural colours most of the time and adequate contrast levels. The noise is also not very visible. They’re still a bit fuzzy on full size, though. Hopefully future firmwares will improve upon this. Overall, I think the photo quality is good for a phone of its price range. Here are some samples:

[more camera samples available here]

The camera interface will be familiar to those who have used previous Cyber-shot phones. It’s speedy, intuitive and has a handful of useful settings. These include:

• Shoot mode – Normal, Smile Shutter^TM, Panorama, Frames, Burst
• Scenes – Auto, Twilight landscape, Landscape, Portrait, Beach / snow, Sports, Document
• Picture size – 3MP, 2MP, 1MP, VGA
• Focus – Auto, Face detection, Macro, Infinite
• Flash – Auto, Off
• Self-timer – On, Off
• Metering mode – Normal, Spot
• White balance – Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Fluorescent, Incandescent
• Effects – Off, Black & white, Negative, Sepia, Solarize
• Picture quality – Normal, Fine
• AF light – Auto, Off
• Review – On, Off
• Add position – On, Off
• Save to – Memory card, Phone memory
• Auto rotate – On, Off
• Shutter sound – Off, Sound 1, Sound 2, Sound 3, Sound 4, Sound 5
• Reset settings
• Reset counter

Some of these are available while shooting videos as well.

The C510 can use the Face detection technology while focusing, similar to the C905 and C902 before it. In that mode, it automatically recognises up to 3 faces in the frame and focuses on the one closest to the centre of the viewfinder. Pretty nifty feature, I know. This time around, Sony Ericsson has decided to put something else to further enhance this technology, called Smile Shutter. As its name implies, it allows your phone to focus on people’s faces and then take the photo the instant they smile. How does the phone know they’re smiling, you ask? You really don’t want me to answer that.
Sadly, though, this feature can’t be used when your sole light source is the LED flash, because when the phone stops focusing, the focus assist light stops as well, leaving the phone literally unable to see people smile. That’s a bit stupid on Sony Ericsson’s side.

The handset also supports geo-tagging, which means that it saves the GPS coordinates of every picture you’ve taken, as long as the setting is turned on. It uses the phone’s mobile network connection to work out your position, much like Google maps. You can then view the locations of each photo from the gallery via the aforementioned app.

As with all Cyber-shot phones (sans K800 and K550), there are shortcuts on the keypad which allow you to change certain camera settings on the fly. They light up in blue when you activate the camera, along with the camera key and the D-pad. They allow you to change the shoot mode, the scenes, the focus and the flash mode.  Judging from personal experience, these are awfully useful.

The C510 shoots videos with a 240×320 (QVGA) resolution at 30 frames per second.  We’d hardly expect anything more from a mid-end phone. The resulting videos are quite nice as well. You can bet that YouTube will be satisfied. As mentioned, you can even use the LED flash as a torch in low-light conditions. Here are some samples:

Video sample 1

Video sample 2

The C510’s music player is located in the Media menu, as with all recent Sony Ericsson phones. It’s basically a less-featured version of the Walkman v.3 player, lacking novelties suck as Shake control, SensMe; some useful filters, like Year and Genre and the Clear Audio and Clear Bass technologies from the higher-end walkmans. It still does the job, though. In fact, it’s still one of the best music software on the mobile phone market. It’s full of flashy animations and most of all, is very easy to use. It’s pretty speedy as well, even while playing music in the background (though it lags a bit then). It can also be set to auto-rotate when you turn the phone to the side. There’s also a dynamic search feature, which can be used to find any song in your list as you’re typing its title.

You can customize the sound output in a number of different ways. These include modifying the 5-bar equalizer, which includes MegaBass – a feature that heightens the basses but diminishes the trebles, and activating stereo widening, which gives the sound a “deeper feel” at the cost of the bass volume. Of course, the player can be set to loop and/or shuffle the songs as well.

On a side note, it supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, RealAudio 8, and several WMA file formats. It also shows album art. That should leave most people’s needs covered.

The sound quality is quite average, frankly. The basses are on the silent side and overall the volume could have been a bit higher. Despite that, it will probably leave most of its users pleased, as it basically does the job. It was never meant to be a music phone either. That is also implied by the bundled headphones, which aren’t of significant quality. But they’re still as good as (or even better than) the majority of headphones shipped with other manufacturers’ phones.

The C510 also comes with an FM radio receiver. The radio player supports RDS, which means that you’ll be able to see information about the particular station you’re listening to on your screen. You can also save up to 20 favourite frequencies. One thing to note though – you need to have a pair of headphones plugged into the phone if you want to listen to radio. You can choose to transfer the audio to the loudspeaker, but you still need a set of wired headphones, because the cable actually acts as an antenna.

The loudspeaker, while being pretty decent for notifying you whenever someone’s calling, probably won’t satisfy those who seek to use it for listening to music outdoors or in a noisy environment.

There’s also TrackID onboard – Sony Ericsson’s free music recognition service. With it, you can retrieve information about the title, artist and album of the currently playing song (either records a clip from the internal radio, if you’re using that, or uses the microphone). The results come back usually within 10-15 seconds. Data traffic charges may apply, though, depending on your operator plan. The service is amazingly accurate and has proven to be quite handy.

The C510 comes preloaded with 3 games.

The first one is called Bubble Town and is very reminiscent to the game Luxor, if anyone’s played that. The goal is to clear a field of differently-coloured balloon-like creatures by hitting them with other differently-coloured balloon-like creatures. When 3 of a colour are next to each other, they pop. The game is surprisingly addictive and is sure to cause the fast draining of the phone’s battery on your behalf.

The second one is called NitroStreet Racing. It’s like Need for Speed ProStreet, really. You drive a car either by using the D-pad or the accelerometer, you unlock new ones, you unlock new tracks, etc.
While the game isn’t bad, I like the NFS one better.

The third game is Sudoku. What you do is try to solve Sudoku puzzles with varying difficulties. The greater the difficulty, the more points you earn, which can be spent on customizing you virtual avatar and winning virtual trophies. You can also invite your friends to your personal little Sudoku cafe to play there so that you may improve its rating. There’s also a quiz game which involves guessing your friends’ tastes… or something.  It’s quite an entertaining little game – especially to Sudoku fans.

The C510 supports both tri-band GSM / EDGE (that’s 900/1800/1900) networks, and UMTS / HSDPA 2100 (3.6 Mbps) networks. The American variant, C510a, furthermore adds support for 850 / 900 MHz 3G networks and 850 MHz 2G ones.

The phone supports Bluetooth v2.o. That way, can transfer files between the phone and, say, a computer or even other phones, regardless of the manufacturer. You can also stream music via it, as it supports the A2DP profile. You can use the phone as a Human Interface Device as well (i.e. remote) for your PC. It’s capable of transferring files at speeds of about 140 kilobytes per second.

The web browser that ships with the phone is called NetFront 3.4. It’s actually a pretty nice browser. It has a nice cursor-oriented interface that makes browsing pages considerably easier. You can save web pages and pictures, mark favourite sites, pan and zoom, search for sites and find text on a particular site using Find option. You can browse pages in text-only mode as well, in order to reduce data traffic. The home page is a customized Soy Ericsson start page, which gives you fast access to Google search, your browsing history, a link to Sony Ericsson’s fun & downloads mobile site and more.
NetFront 3.4 supports CSS, HTML, xHTML, and light Javascripts. It cannot display any Flash content. It’s quite a nice web browser when it comes to rendering web sites. You can also use the browser in landscape mode, and it will automatically switch to landscape mode if you tilt the phone.

RSS feeds provide a brilliant opportunity for people to keep themselves updated on the latest news from various websites. This is built right into the web browser, and if you’re browsing a website with RSS feeds, you’ll be notified by a RSS icon at the top of the browser. From here on it’s easy to add the feed to your list of subscriptions on the phone. You can set the feed to be updated automatically or manually, if that’s what you prefer. You can easily access your feeds from the Media menu, but if you don’t want to go through the hassle (or lack thereof) of doing that every time, you can simply add the feeds directly onto the standby screen. This is quite a brilliant solution, if you’re a keen user of RSS feeds.

The C510 supports most common e-mail services, including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. You’ll have to set up everything manually though, unless you choose to make use of Sony Ericsson’s online e-mail set-up. The phone also supports push e-mail. You can make use of both IMAP4 and POP3 protocols.

The C510 can hold up to 1000 contacts or 1700 phone numbers. That’s quite enough for most people, in my opinion. Each contact can be given the following information:

• Name
• Number (Mobile, Mobile (private), Mobile (work), Home, Work, Fax, and Other)
• E-mail (up to 3 e-mail addresses)
• Web address
• Picture
• Contact-specific ringtone
• Voice command
• Work information (Title, Company, Street, City, State, Zip code, and Country)
• Personal information (Street, City, State, Zip code, and Country)
• Info (a note)
• Birthday (can be added to the calendar)

You can send contacts to other phones via Bluetooth, MMS, SMS and e-mail or sync them with your PC.  Contacts backups can be done right on your memory card or on your computer, using the Sony Ericsson PC Suite. There’s also an option to save 9 speed dial numbers, naturally. Saving groups for quickly sending multiple messages at once is also possible.
Dynamic contact search is, of course, present.

The C510 supports the use of SMS, MMS, EMS, e-mail and voice messages.

The message editor found on the C510 is a universal one, used for both writing SMS and MMS messages. It’s quite easy to use and is visually pleasing. You can add emoticons, pictures and photos, videos, sound files and even recordings to an MMS. There’s also a feature called conversation messaging, which displays all your messages with a certain contact in speech balloons under each other. It’s quite handy, that is.

As always, the T9 dictionary is the best on the market and miles ahead of anything else out there. You can always add a word to the dictionary if it’s not in there already. The C510 supports EMS messaging, so you can add graphical smilies, sound effects, animations and small black/white pictures to your SMS messages. You can also set up templates, or use the default ones. These can be added without even leaving the editor. Other features include a large variety of special symbols, support for copying and pasting text, changing writing settings, such as language, dictionary, word predictions and suggestions.

The C510, being a phone, can make calls, as preposterous as that may sound. To make a call, you dial the number via the keypad, search for a contact in your contacts list or recent calls one, or use the Smart Search feature, which suggests certain contacts, depending on which characters you’re typing right on standby. That last one is quite a useful feature, I’ll tell you that.

In addition to voice calling, the C510 can do video calling as well. There’s a front-facing video call camera for that purpose. The video stream it produces can be mirrored, or replaced with a static picture.

The network reception we’re quite pleased with. The signal strength was fluctuating at times during the testing period, though, but it quickly recovered. No dropped calls too.

The call manager can be brought up by pressing the Send key when in standby mode. It brings up a list of 30 of the most recent calls. These can be categorized by all, answered, dialed and missed.

Quite frankly, we fancy the C510, despite it not being a high-end phone. It’s thin, has a fantastic design and feels very well both while in the hand or in the pocket. While its camera could have been a tad better, me referring particularly to the low quality of the night shots. The lack of a xenon flash is to blame for that in most cases, though.

This petite snapper will always have a place in our hearts, as humorous as that may sound. If it was us, we’d definitely grab one – at least as a back-up phone. It does everything it’s supposed to do quite well and in style. Its price is pretty decent as well. Despite its deficiencies, we recommend this phone, no doubt.

[review based on firmware revision R1DA032]

Video – unboxing the C510

[HD video stream at YouTube] [HD video download link]

Gallery of the C510

[View with PicLens]

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