Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/17/review_se_s500i/
Sony Ericsson S500i mobile phone
All flash and no features?
Posted in Personal Tech, 17th October 2007 13:40 GMT
Review With its pulsing lights and back-to-nature themes, Sony Ericsson’s S500i is aimed at the supposed style-savvy consumer. But does this sliderphone have the functionality and appeal to really grab fashion-phone followers?
Sony Ericsson has been busy of late peppering its handset range with new Walkman and Cyber-shot models, dangling music and cameraphone excellence to tempt buyers. But the company has also been flirting with the style-conscious buyer with phones like the candybar T650i and now the S500i.
Sony Ericsson's S500i: floral wallpaper
Rather than opting for glinting ultra-flash styling or fashion-house chic, though, Sony Ericsson claims to have been influenced by the natural world. Sony Ericsson spin-meister Steve Walker said: "Our designers have taken inspiration from nature and the Nordic light to produce phones that are beautiful to look at and alive with energy."
Yeeessss. You can read what we think of this kind of tosh here, courtesy of our very own Hardware Widow.
But enough of the flummery - on with the features. Lighting is one of the S500i's most notable design characteristics, with side panels that pulse and glow as the phone is being used and to alert you to calls. This is nothing new with mobiles, but Sony Ericsson has here gone for a more subtle interpretation rather than pure disco-phone or glow-stick replacement.
The lighting's colours can be switched between the straightforwardly named Red, Green and Orange to the more florid Love, Fire, Disco, Glimmeringpulse and more to suit your "Nordic" lighting tastes.
The S500i measures a pocket-pleasing 1.4cm thick, though at 9.9cm long its reaching candybar-length proportions. The casing is glossy plastic, and has a tactile rubber-feel back panel. The front casing is a bit squeaky when pushing up and down, which points a finger at some cost savings. The spring-action is smooth and substantial enough, however.
Sony Ericsson has been clever in using some unusual, contrasting colours to lift the 550i above your average slider. We looked at the Mysterious Green version – a predominantly black phone with emerald green keypad hidden under the slider, and a subtle glowing green circle around the front navigation key. Other versions of the S500i are decked out in Ice Purple, Contrasted Copper and Spring Yellow.
The S500i's remaining features are run of the mill. They include a music player; two-megapixel camera for stills and video; web browser with RSS support; and a Memory Stick Micro (M2) memory card slot. It's limited to quad-band GSM/GPRS/Edge.
Laura Ashley, actually
Thankfully, the keypad has regular spaced, normal-sized pads that are well suited to swift texting. Much of the S500i's functionality can be accessed when closed, using the circular navigation pad and accompanying soft-menu keys and shortcuts. In addition, the navigation pad is programmed for one-button access to the camera, and three other feature shortcuts can be assigned to your most used functions.
Using the navigation pad is more awkward than it is on most Sony Ericsson phones, particularly for those with without nails or delicate digits. The raised outer ring encircling the navigation pad doesn't press in as might be intuitively expected. You actually have to press inside this - while avoiding hitting the central select button.
Once you've mastered this process, menu navigation is straightforward. One-button press takes you into the main menu, which is displayed as either a grid or carousel of icons, depending on which theme you select. The S500i offers a changing Day and Night theme that cycles the look over a 24-hours period, and a nature-based Everchanging theme which changes subtly over time. Others can be downloaded if you're more city stylist than country cousin.
The user interface enables you to tab through various menu options and sub-menus fairly rapidly without losing your bearings. The Back button comes to the rescue if you're not sure where you are.
Getting to grips with the S500i is easy. The music player can be fired up from within the menus and delivers a good sound, although the limited earphones supplied don't quite produce audio quality to match ones supplied with Walkman-brand phones - the S500i's have less bass response and dynamic range. Adding standard headphones requires an additional adaptor, as the S500i uses a proprietary connector.
Alternatively, you could opt for stereo Bluetooth headphones, as this phone handles the A2DP Bluetooth protocol. The handset will also work as a speakerphone too.
The music player doesn't have as snazzy a user interface as the new Walkman 2.0 player, but it does the job effectively. You can select by artists, tracks and playlists, and use a shuffle feature. You can adjust equaliser settings to tweak the sound.
A nature inspired tactile casing?
Sony Ericsson supplies Disc2Phone PC software for ripping CDs and copying their tracks over to the handset. This can also be done by dragging and dropping tracks onto an M2 card in the phone when it's connected by the supplied USB cable.
There was no M2 card bundles with our phone, but the limited internal memory of the S500i – just 12MB – means adding an M2 card will be essential if you want to listen to tunes. With 1GB M2 cards now widely available for under £15, that's not a huge issue, but it also means Sony Ericsson's being cheap by not bundling one.
The M2 card will also be required if you want to make regular use of the two-megapixel camera. You need you open the slider to reveal the camera, which is quite an average performer as Sony Ericsson cameraphones go, with no autofocus or macro close-up modes.
When shooting pics, you can't compose shots using the full display - which is a bright and clear 240 x 320-resolution, 262,144-colour job. Instead, you're stuck with a horizontal strip to frame images, with camera control icons surrounding it. Settings can be adjusted for white balance, night mode and shooting quality, and various effects – including panorama shooting - can be implemented before and after shooting to sex-up the pics. For a 2Mp camera, the images are decent enough for mid-range shots in good light. However, close-up work and low light level shooting aren't going to improve your pictures.
Sony Ericsson has again included its Blogger-linked blogging software, so you can send pics with text to an online blog with a few key presses. The video recording function offers typically limited mobile phone shooting quality, at a maximum of 176 x 144 pixels resolution.
The Access NetFront browser is a full internet browser, and can present websites in full screen or small screen rendered mode, optimised for mobiles. It can even deliver them in landscape on the display. Sony Ericsson has set up default internet access so you get Google as your home page. The browser works remarkably quickly, despite the lack of 3G connectivity.
Squeaky slider
Messaging options on the S500i include an email client alongside the usual MMS and text. Additional organiser features include calendar, tasks, notes, a calculator and a stopwatch. You can easily sync calendar and contacts with your PC using supplied PC Suite software. In addition, there are a couple of extra Java apps loaded - AudiblePlayer for downloadable audiobooks, and AccuWeather Light for worldwide weather updates.
More Java apps are downloadable, as are games. Two games are pre-loaded: Brain Juice and Lumines Block Challenge. Sony Ericsson's standard tools for tweaking images and sounds – PhotoDJ, VideoDJ and Music DJ - are also present.
The S500i delivered a solid performance as phone. It produced fine sound quality on both ends of a call. Sony Ericsson quotes battery life at up to nine hours' talk time and 370 hours on stand-by. While we weren't able to rack up 15 days in normal use - the music player, camera and other functions squeeze those figures - we had no problems keeping the phone active for a good five days before reaching for the charger. Not at all bad when you consider most modern phones need charging every other evening.
Verdict
'Sloany' Ericsson's S500i is a phone that's targeted at a young, style-conscious consumer, though its illuminated charms will not be to everyone's taste. Its colour variations and themes provide a fashionable twist to a competitively-priced model, though the plasticky front casing is disappointing, and the phone's imaging limitations and lack of 3G may turn off some buyers. But it does offer a decent array of features and a design that will be appealing to many. Particularly if you dig that northern lights action, man...