My Sony Ericsson C510 was a brilliant phone. It was so good, I never again looked at mobile phone websites or picked up an operator’s catalogue to see what sort of phones now exist on the market. I was so satisfied with everything that it did, it was like finding the love of my life. Never would I need another.
Then came along the sodding 28th of February. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that day, in fact, it’s a fine day, it’s my cousin’s birthday. I’m referring to 28th of February, 2010. I thought it would be a spiffing idea to take my family out to dinner and watch that weekend’s big football game. I should’ve bloody well stayed at home, since I saw my team lose 3-0 after a pathetic performance, the dinner was so-and-so yet cost of precious end-of-the-month money, I was drenched in rain and, worst of all, I lost my phone.
For all I know, it was pilfered by one of the shifty thugs that infested the shit-hole of a restaurant my friend with absolutely no sense of taste for pleasant spots chose for us to watch the game. Or maybe it fell out of my pocket as I raced through the downpour and into my car. Perhaps I left it on the table and the waiter didn’t notice and wrapped it up in the paper tablecloth and threw it in the bin. It didn’t and still doesn’t matter. It’s gone, and still aches even today, and it’s not lessened by currently having a similar phone. I now have a Sony Ericsson C902, but I had to go through another mobile first before realising I couldn’t do without the C510’s nifty features.
I decided I would punish myself for being a twerp and losing an object so dear to me by getting a cheap, stripped-down handset. I had only two requirements: it had to have a music player and it had to be a Sony Ericsson. A phone with a media player, to me, is a no-brainer. If the phone’s any good, you’ll all the advantages of a regular mp4 player, with some additional ones, such as the battery life being better and not having to lug around extra devices. And I wanted a Sony Ericsson because I have a data cable, I have the SE PC Suite and using them together, I could recover all of my contacts, photos, videos, notes and bookmarks that I had backed up five days prior to losing my mobile.
I settled on the SE W302, because it satisfied my two basic requirements and, most of all, it was cheap. I blew €200 on the C510, not counting the memory card, and I didn’t feel like squandering that much cash again. So let’s go by bits:
Good
- It’s small and very thin (only 10.5mm thick), and also good-looking. Not having an ugly mobile counts for a lot, since you’ll have to look at it every day.
- Even though the keys are small, I found no trouble in texting.
- It was very cheap. You won’t find a Nokia only 10.5mm thick with a 2.0-megapixel camera, media player and expandable memory for the same price. It also came with a data cable and proper headphones, so for €60, this was a fantastic bargain.
-The texting had the auto-complete function, where it guesses what you’re trying to write and offers suggestions that you can select. Very handu for long words and slow writers, like myself. This is something I’ve missed having since my Motorola V525.
- It can be charged via USB. I cannot emphasize enough how important this is.
Bad
- Only after having bought it did I discover that it wasn’t compatible with the SE PC Suite . This was disastrous, since it defeated the purpose of buying a Sony Ericsson.
- I had to manually import the contacts one by one via bluetooth, because a) it wasn’t compatible with the PC Suite as I’ve mentioned, and b) it wouldn’t accept my Sony Ericsson V600i’s entire address list, only individual entries. This incompatibility between two mobiles from the same brand is unfathomable.
- Each contact had a field for first name and surname, which seemed a good idea. But on ringing someone, it would reverse the proper order, so “Smith John” or “Bloggs Joe” appears on the screen, which I found very annoying.
- Battery autonomy was nothing special. I don’t know how other mobiles in its class fare, but I found it sub-par.
- The 2.0-megapixel camera was overwhelmingly crap. I wasn’t expecting CyberShot quality but my five year-old SE V600i with its 1.3-megapixel camera takes better pictures.
- No notes function, to jot down important tidbits of information. I had to write text messages with the info and save it as a draft. This was annoying also.
- Having the phone save sent text messages taxed the memory in a jiffy. Annoying, stupid and unforgivable.
- Writing in Portuguese requires accentation. Text messages and accents don’t go well together, since having the odd circumflex and such makes a simple, let’s say, 100-character message the equivalent in terms of byte information of three or four text messages. Every other mobile I’ve had allows you to write with accentation then wipes it clean of accents so it’ll be a single message. The W302 doesn’t purge accentuation, meaning what should’ve been a single message is sent as three or four.
Awful
- It’s incapable of delivery reports. In this day and age, a mobile incapable of delivery reports is like a car currently in production that comes with everything except glass windows. It can be done, the car will still work, there’s probably no legislation against it, but it doesn’t make much sense.
- The sound. Whether it’s a phone call or music, whether with the headphones or speakers, the sound quality is terrible. There are lots of options for playback equalising, with it being a Walkman phone and all, but the sound always has a nasty metallic echo to it. Basslines when listening to music are barely perceptible, and you can crank it up to maximum volume and you won’t hear much, and what you do hear lacks any quality. And it’s a mobile PHONE, so you should be able to hear and be heard during phonecalls.
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