In the Mix
And codec support isn't up up there with the best PMPs, extending no further than MP3 and AAC for music and MPEG 4 video at or below the screen's native resoution. There’s no support for MTP media transfer either so you can kiss your playlists goodbye.
The camera is fine for a cheap phone
The bundled earbuds don’t look anything special but they produce a well balanced and pleasant sound. Thankfully, Sony has forgone proprietary connectors. The earphones connect through a 3.5mm jack at the top, and the phone connects by Micro USB. You can drag’n’drop media onto it as mass storage.
Alongside the Walkman music player the Mix also packs in Java apps for Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and eBuddy, an e-mail client, FM radio and Obigo’s Q7 web browser, though this is best avoided in favour of Opera Mini.
On-board storage is a measly 120MB but there is a Micro SD slot under the battery good for cards of up to 32GB capacity. You get absolutely nothing in the box, which is pretty poor.
The earphones aren't bad, but the handset's volume could go a lot higher
The 3.2Mp camera may lack autofocus or a flash but the end results aren't at all bad for this price band. They present a natural colour balance and good definition. You get a useful physical shutter button on the side of the handset.
The absence of a fully fledged smartphone OS and 3G has a beneficial impact on battery life. Sony claims 13 hours of music playback, over nine and a half hours of talk time, and 20 days on standby. I’ll not argue with the first two numbers, and this is certainly a phone that can be made to last the best part of a week between charges.
Verdict
With Android smartphones getting ever cheaper the squeeze is on for lesser phones like the Mix. But its superior battery life and fine sounding music player means this Sony Ericsson could still have made an argument for itself if only it had more audio welly. It’s just too quiet to work on a train, plane or even an automobile, and surely that's the point of the thing. ®
Thanks to Vodafone for the review sample
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Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman
COMMENTS
That...
...is a very nice looking phone, from the front anyway. The UI isn't half bad either, although possibly not to everybody's taste (assuming it's roughly similar to the Xperia)
Shows that good phone design isn't restricted to generic black rectangles and little coloured squares - guess Apple might have had a point in rapping Samsung's knuckles, given that they could have gone a multitude of different ways - this being one of them.
</ducks and prepares to be flamed by anti-Apple zealots>
Weak Audio?
OK, so it suffers from the European ear protection disease. But what exactly is the sound level it puts out? An early Apple iSnot Nanu (G2) delivered a measly 2.5 milliwatts into my 32 ohm earbuds while a cheapo Korean MP3 player blasted 25 mW into them. I want a milliwatt figure, not just "weak sound level".
the 995 is metal and a mans phone for building sites etc, while engineers have the filofax of the iphone
retro phone
It's powered by obsolete OS but sports touchscreen? I don't get it. Why not just use a keyboard? IMO remake of Moto RAZR V3i with 3G an 3.5 jack would do much better in the market, given that RAZR is metal and stylich while Walkman is cheap plastic and ugly.
walkman phones are not about the volume of earphones, it is the output speaker on the phone itself, and will and can be heard 60yards away on a quite cold night, while the music player is usually all organized and easy to use
walkman on the phone is just so you know what you are getting while the rest of the phone is the same as all other version with a few changes, and the only range SE should have
