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Archive for February, 2010

The newest Walkman phone in the range of Sony Ericsson mobile phones is, like its predecessor, the W580, intended as a music phone; that’s its whole reason for existing. It’s an improvement on the old model, adding 3.5G into the mix, making uploading and downloading decidedly faster.

In many ways, however, it’s not a great improvement on the W580. As before, the Walkman button transports the user to the music manager, which is a good, clean interface that’s easy to use. The screen itself is exceptionally bright and sharp, and the audio quality is everything that Sony Ericsson aims to deliver.

A 2GB M2 card comes with the phone for content, but, really, it needs to be much larger; anyone truly serious about music is going to want more storage than that. Also why, oh why, didn’t the company build in a 3.5mm headphone jack? Instead you need to use the proprietary jack that’s supplied, and even if it does allow two pairs of headphones to be plugged in to share music, it’s still not good enough.

The camera is adequate, but without autofocus or flash, it lacks two important items. That said, web browsing is very fast, given the HSDPA, and it’s very simple and quick to upload videos.

Ultimately, the Sony Ericsson just doesn’t quite cut the mustard as a fully-fledged music phone. There are better Sony Ericsson mobile phone offerings in this field. Really, this is a phone on which you can play a few tunes and take a few pictures – a mobile phone with some extras – and nothing more.

Anyone looking for a camera phone that could stand in as a very good replacement for their digital camera only needs to look as far as the Nokia N86, which benefits from Nokia’s exceptional camera phone experience, all put together in this model.

When Nokia talks camera phone with the N86, it’s not kidding, The camera is a whopping eight megapixels, and the Carl Zeiss wide angle lens ensures crystal clear pictures, good enough to please the most discerning eye. The digital zoom works well here, thanks to the high picture resolution. Unfortunately, you have to go through menus to reach the camera, rather than just using the shutter button, which makes everything more fiddly than it really needed to be.

Users can readily upload finished pictures to Flickr (and movies to YouTube), but it’s a shame that there’s no easy upload to Facebook. However, viewing pictures on the phone’s screen is a delight, even though it’s not too generous at just 2.6”.

On the downside, the direction pad isn’t too easy to use, but a well-spaced, responsive keypad more than makes up for it. With GPS built in and 3G, it offers more than just pictures, and the 3.5mm headphone jack allows users to employ their own headphones for listening.

The Nokia N86 does a lot of things well, but it does pictures superbly – simply one of the very best camera phones on the market. It should be among the top choices for anyone seriously considering replacing their digital camera with a camera phone.