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HelpSony Ericsson T650 review
By Michell Bak, 6th of January 2008
Who doesn’t remember the good old T610? I certainly do, mainly because it was one of Sony Ericsson’s best products ever and it was an important brick in a huge puzzle for the manufacturer. The story goes on with the T650, which is a 12.5 millimetre thin design oriented phone with an excellent camera. T650 will be popular – I just know it will!
Official product pictures of Sony Ericsson T650
Advantages
- 3G connection & Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP support
- Excellent 3.2 mega pixel camera
- Impressive specifications at only 12.5 millimetres in depth
- Exclusive materials
- Crystal clear mineral glass QVGA TFT display
- Sound quality and loudness
- Cool animations and visual effects
Disadvantages
- Only LED flash
- Relatively conservative display size (only 1.9 inches)
- Bad video recording quality
Sony Ericsson’s best camera phone at the moment, the K850, can easily be compared with the fashionable T650. Both are candy bar phones packing a set of high-tech specifications and a nice design. When comparing you’ll quickly notice a strong difference in terms of the thickness of the phones – K850 is much thicker and also heavier than T650. Both are well built and feel very good in the hand, although I somehow feel like T650 fits the palm of my hand a little better.
Comparing the fashionable sharpshooter T650 with Sony Ericsson’s own K850
So what does the box look like? Well, I got the green edition to test, so the box was green and had a cool pattern (replicating the T650’s keypad) several places not only on the box, but also on the content.
T650 comes with a bunch of stuff in the box. You’ll find the usual stuff like charger, wired stereo headset (this one is the same as with the Walkman phones, it’s just not Walkman branded), battery (930 mAh), USB cable, lots of manuals and of course the software CD with the PC Suite and other usable PC applications on it. But there’s more in the T650 box – T650 also comes with a nice fabric case for protecting the phone and also a very cool docking station!
You can find pictures of my T650 unboxing here and a video of it below.
Brushed steel and mineral glass
T650 is a cool candy bar phone measuring a mere 12.5 millimetres in depth. T650 comes in both a blue and green colour variant and Sony Ericsson recently also announced a black variant. I tested the green one and it looks good. The materials used in T650 are high quality materials such as the brushed steel around the display and back and the display and pointy camera lens is covered by scratch-resistant mineral glass. The lower part of the phone is where the colour is – as said, either black, blue or green. The surface feels matt and rather nice to touch. However it’s a bit slippery and it can be hard to get a good grip of the phone.
The keypad on T650 feels pretty good to use. The keys are rather small and shaped like small boxes, and I must say, that they look uncomfortable to use. But actually they aren’t a bit 
I had expected the soft keys to be weird to use, but again, this phone proved me wrong. They were very comfortable to use. Furthermore T650’s keypad has some cool lighting effects that will show depending on what’s happening on the phone (video below).
Nice materials and great keypad on the T650
This phone’s dimensions are 104 x 46 x 12.5 millimetres and is thereby one of the thinnest candy bar phones from Sony Ericsson. Only phones like W880 and W890 are thinner than this one. The thin and relatively small dimensions of this phone makes it very good to carry around and it fits easily in your pocket. It weighs 95 grams, which seems like a lot compared to the dimensions, but this is because of the materials.
Video showing the T650’s keypad lighting effects
The back of T650 holds the camera and the loud speaker at the bottom. The upper part of the phone is made of stainless brushed steel and the camera glass is in fact mineral glass. After having taken the backside off and on a few times, it started feeling a bit loose and said some weird noises.
Stainless steel and mineral glass on the camera
You’ll find the lock to the backside on the top of the phone. It’s like a small slider, that needs to be pressed to the side. On the left side you’ll find the FastPort connector, while camera keys are to be found on the right side of the phone. The bottom of the phone holds nothing.
Backside lock on the top • FastPort connector on the left side
In the T650 box you’ll also find a set of extra accessories. One of these is the black protective bag, which fits the T650 perfectly! Another thing is the “docking station” where you can put your phone. It’s also possible to charge your phone while being there.
Some of the accessories that comes with T650
Once you’ve removed the back of the phone, you’ll have access to the battery, memory card (slot) and SIM card. The battery is a BST-33 standard battery (930 mAh). This one is good for up to 300 hours of standby or 7 hours of talk time (official numbers). It lasted 3-4 days with me before it needed to be charged again, which is really good! The memory card slot is located at the left bottom of the phone around the speaker. The SIM card slot is located near the top of the phone.
Back cover, battery, memory card & SIM card
Lets go underwater
Like a great number of Sony Ericsson’s newer phones, the T650 supports Flash Lite menu styles. There are four different themes, and three of these make use of the Flash Lite menus. These menus are pretty cool and their appearance and colours change accordingly to the time of the day.
Standby screen • Flash menus
The menu is built up in a grid layout of 3 x 4 icons, each representing either a certain feature or a folder like Entertainment, that leads to a number of sub folders and applications such as the folder ‘Games’ or the application ‘videoDJ’.
T650 makes use of the A100 operating system. This means that there are two soft keys, where the left soft key typically will represent the Select-option and the right one will represent More-option, which brings a menu up with further settings, actions and such. This system is extremely easy to relate to and it’s highly user friendly.
T650 has been one of the most stable Sony Ericsson phones I’ve ever used. The fact that it makes use of A100, which has been developed for years now, is the main reason for this. You can use the phone for multitasking – i.e. having multiple Java applications and games opened at once while having the web browser open and having an active call going on at the same time. Pretty good for a ‘dumb phone’, isn’t it?
The menu system is very easy to use, as I’ve said earlier on, and it gives a good overview of what you can do. If you’re in Settings, you’ll notice that there’s suddenly a number of tabs, each representing something (Display, Calls, etc.). This makes it way easier to navigate between the different settings than it would have been to go back and forth all the time.
How’s the weather?
T650 comes with only one application pre installed, and I honestly don’t understand why. The T650 has such a good camera, surely a camera application would could have been on the phone as well. Anyhow, the application is called AccuWeather Lite and is a weather application for displaying various localized weather infos. It makes use of your mobile data connection (GPRS or 3G), but comes with low costs since it’s only a matter of a few kilobytes per update.
AccuWeather Lite (picture from GSMArena’s T650 review)
The file manager is not the same as in K850/W910, which I said was the best file manager on any feature phone out there. The K850/W910 one has been significantly updated, but T650’s file manager is by no means bad. It’s however not to be found in the “Organizer” menu like on A200 phones, which for me is a good thing.
File manager • Timeline view
Like on most Sony Ericsson phones it’s possible to set up to 5 different alarms and you can choose which days for them to ring on, when and if it’s a returning alarm or not. Alarms will also ring when the phone is off. Generally everything works quite well here.
Calender • Day-view • Calculator
I mainly used the calender for remember which classes in school I had at what time and such. It’s pretty good, but creating many calender posts on the phone does take some time, so I often found myself making use of the synchronisation possibilities between Outlook and the T650.
Notes can be created with (what seems to be) a unlimited amount of characters – surely there is a limit, but one much higher than anybody will ever need. These notes can then be posted on the standby screen.
The calculator is rather simple and can be used for dividing, multiplying, subtracting, adding and percent calculations. Furthermore you can add to memory and use the memory. I am missing a few features, but nothing serious. The length of calculations is limited to 9 digits.
If you go to the ‘Entertainment’ spot in the menu you’ll see a set of three “DJ”-applications; VideoDJ, PhotoDJ & MusicDJ. Each can be used for creating or editing the chosen media – i.e. you can edit and create videos with text, colours and effects with VideoDJ, while PhotoDJ can be used for basic fixing and editing photos and at last you can create your own polyphonic tunes with MusicDJ. TrackID is a service that can recognize music, but more about that later. There is also a Bluetooth remote control application for managing i.e. your computer or a presentation via Bluetooth. I’ve used this on several occasions in school. It’s also possible to record sound in AMR-format with T650 – this application is also found in ‘Entertainment’.
Sharpshooter with a dress code
“3.2 mega pixels” and “auto focus” is written on the back of the T650, and that’s exactly what the camera specifications are. Auto focus makes it possible to take both close-ups as well as landscape photos, because the lens will automatically focus on what’s centred. A dual LED flash is right next to the camera and although it’s not a “proper” flash, it’s usable for taking photos in somewhat bad lighting conditions.
Photo capturing • Settings • A cool frame
Camera interface is pretty much the same as the one in K800 but without the Cyber-shot branding. It’s very easy and quick to use and it takes no time getting familiar with. Everything is horizontal, which gives you greater pleasure when taking pictures. Eventhough I like this interface, I do feel like the one on K850 is by far superior. Admittedly, it’s not quite as fast, but it simply feels better and more camera-like than the one on T650.
When using the camera, you have an arsenal of available settings and different effects to play with. Among some are the focus settings, white balance settings and funny frames. A number of keys (1, 4, 7 & *) on the keypad are linked to some settings – picture resolution, focus, night mode and flash. A simple press on the ‘0′ key brings up an overview of the keypad short cuts in camera.
As with all Sony Ericsson handsets with a camera, it’s possible to adjust the lighting settings (± 2.0 lux) and also to use digital zoom (up to 3x).
You can easily switch between photo and video capturing mode by either pressing up or down on the navigation pad. To view your photos, simply press the “View” button on the top right.
Here are some sample photos from the T650’s camera (press to enlarge).
Unfortunately the weather during the review period has been very bad, so there are no outdoor picture samples in good light, I’m afraid. I am however sure that this is where this phone would do its very best!
When looking at the pictures up close, you’ll see quite a lot of noise which has been caused by a mixture of bad lighting and a small camera sensor. The noise isn’t really that great to have, but it’s hard to get rid of it when it starts to get dark outside. There is of course the option to use the LED flash, but it has a tendency to make the pictures over-exposed if the subject is within a short distance.
If we look aside from the amount of noise in the pictures, we’ll see that the image quality is really good. Everything is drawn with a good amount of details and the outcome looks very sharp. Colours are pretty close to reality, but since I haven’t had a proper chance to take pictures in good lighting conditions, this is rather hard for me to determine.
Even though the camera hardware is the exact same as the one used in the Cyber-shot branded K770 and the software is very close to a perfect match, the T650 doesn’t feature PhotoFix for potential colour, contrast and light fixing of pictures.
T650 offers video capturing in a maximum resolution of 176 x 144 pixels (QCIF), and samples show that the videos are 10 frames per second. This is nowhere near being acceptable for such a good phone and especially because the phone is capable of doing much better than this. A positive thing, however, is that many settings are still available in video capturing mode.
A video sample can be found here.
Tune in and listen
The music player in T650 is the same as in most K-series phones and is pretty much a Walkman Player version 1 without the Walkman skin.
Songs are sorted by artist, name and album and you have the ability to add and import play lists, too.
The player itself will show various informations about the song from the ID3 tag of the song. It’s not possible to add album covers to the songs because the player is a bit outdated. There are a few equalizer presets and you have the ability to use a manual equalizer as well.
Player menu • Main player
The sound quality is quite good with the bundled earphones. While not being absolutely perfect in any way, it’s above average.
The phone supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WAV, WMA and m4a, to mention some.
The T650 also has an integrated FM-radio that works when a headset has been put in the phone (it acts as an antenna). The FM-radio also features RDS, so if the radio station, you’re listening to, supports it you can get informations about the song, station or alike. This also makes the phone capable of auto-refining the signal by automatically changing to a better frequency when available.
I’m very impressed by the excellent signal strength of the radio part – it beat my W910 on several occasions, so well done! Sound quality is also here above average, but dependant on the signal strenght and such.
Got game?
Unfortunately the T650 comes with only game, and this is called Lumines Block Challenge. It’s a game like Tetris, but instead of it requiring a full bottom line of blocks, this one will require a number of same-coloured blocks being connected in whatever shape it may be. The game is a bit troublesome to get started with and I didn’t find it very fun to use my time on. Luckily, you can download other Java games to the phone.
Lumines Block Challenge
3G is so yesterday…
The first thing that struck me when reading about the T650, when it was announced, was the fact that the fastest internet connection is 3G. In my opinion, Sony Ericsson should have been a bit faster with the release of HSDPA and should have included it in this phone, while still keeping the price tag at a fair level. Enough daydreaming, they didn’t do it and that’s what matters now.
T650’s web browser It’s possible to zoom and thereby enlarge the text
As you know, 3G gives about 400 Kbps download speed in optimal conditions. This is enough for making video calls and also downloading content from the internet – it’s not the fastest and most stable thing out there, but it’ll do. While T650’s web browser application, NetFront, isn’t the best option for cellphones with a relatively slow internet connection, it does do a good job with rendering web sites and browsing the web. I’d still recommend Opera Mini 4 any day, though.
You can exchange files with Bluetooth. T650 supports Bluetooth 2.0 and A2DP, but there’s no EDR support, so you’re stuck with transfers around 40-50 KB/s.
The data speed is more than acceptable when dealing with emails on the phone. Especially if you choose only to download the headers and not the content of the emails, when updating your inbox. The rest of the email will of course be downloaded if you press on the message title. It’s easy to set up email accounts on the phone and the phone supports most – if not all – sorts of encodings. It’s not possible to view attached office files and alike, but everything that is readable for the phone is also readable in the email application. All sorts of files can be attached on outgoing emails, though. Receiving / sending emails is done in the background.
The phone also has an RSS reader built-in and it’s very simple to use. You simple type in the RSS-address or press on an RSS-feed link in the web browser, and it will automatically be added to the RSS reader. You can update the feeds in the background.
More than a list of contacts
T650’s phone book has room for up to 1000 contacts with fully filled contact fields (name, address, emails, website, birthday, etc.). You can assign up to 5 phone numbers per contact, but the phone has a limit of 2500 phone numbers in total.
The list of contacts can be sorted by either contact fields, name and surname. It is possible to set what fields to display when highlighting a contact. Also, when highlighting a contact, you can press the navigation pad either left or right and go through the displayed fields and informations.
Contacts
If you choose to also assign images to contacts, these will show when those certain contacts call you or you call them – videos can also be assigned to contacts and will work in the same way. The SIM card can also be used for storing contacts, but I never use that for anything for backups. Mainly because of the limited storage on the SIM card, but also because you can’t store the same amount of details. A backup of the phone book can also be stored on the memory card.
Texting with smilies and animations
When it comes to messaging, this phone holds up the high standards set by the manufacturer and delivers one of the best sets of messaging capabilities on a phone. You can send SMS, MMS and chat messages.
Test SMS message
SMS messages can be sent including a large amount of cool smilies, animations, sound effects and mono-coloured pictures. It’s also possible to do a little formatting when sending SMS messages. There is no character counter until just before you reach the end of a single SMS (160 characters). The SMS part of the phone is very good and among the best offerings on the market.
MMS messages can be composed with lots of stuff. You can change the background colours, images, sounds and videos, add text and also have many different pages. These can be timed, so they’ll go to the next page after a certain time. Again, Sony Ericsson is by far superior on this area and there’s no other offering out there that does the same.
SMS messages are stored on phone memory / SIM memory, while MMS messages are stored on phone memory / memory card.
Calls are a breeze
T650 supports two types of calls – normal audio calls and video calls with both audio and live pictures of the person you’re talking with. Admittedly, I’ve only tried out the first thing, but generally 3G isn’t suitable for videos calls due to the slow upload speed. HSDPA is much better here.
Calling • Call list
Anyhow, calls on T650 are a breeze! The sound quality is very good and it feels good to have the phone to your ear (this is not the case with all phones!). The volume is at a fair volume level and it’s possible to turn on speaker mode. I usually do this when I need to talk on the phone while doing something else.
The call list can be used for managing the last 30 calls and will show calls with full details (date, time and who called).
Worth a buy!
T650 has proved to be a really good mobile phone with (for most people) excessive multimedia features and an extremely stable operating system that performs well.
The design of this phone will make many people interested in the phone, and I have a feeling that a good part of the crowd could end up buying it simply because of its looks and feel.
The battery life is very good and can easily last about 3-4 days with normal use of the phone functions, camera and a bit of listening to music or the radio on your way to school or work in the morning.
The pricing of the phone in Denmark isn’t that great. In my opinion it costs too much compared to other offerings from Sony Ericsson – i.e. it costs about £150 more than a W880 with the same contract. This is obviously something that has to do with the operators’ prices, but will have an effect on whether this phone will be successful and on who will end up buying this rather than another lower-priced phone.
The main question to ask yourself when considering this phone, however, will be if this is the one for you. Sony Ericsson has many other phones that are very much alike – K770, K800 and K810 to mention a few. What’s more is that some of these have a lower price.
[Review based on firmware revision R7AA024]
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