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Sony Ericsson Walkman W705 music phone

Add GPS and it becomes the W715

An above-average set of in-ear earphone buds is supplied with the W705, enabling the Walkman music player to put in a high quality audio performance out of the box, with good tonal balance and plenty of presence at the low end. The phone has an equaliser if you fancy boosting the bass or fiddling with other frequencies.

Sony Ericsson Walkman W705

You can shake the W705 - but it's easier to control with the keys

Once again, Sony Ericsson has used a side-mounted multi-connector socket for the earphones rather than a standard 3.5mm socket. But there's a 3.5mm adaptor on the two-piece headset so you can upgrade the earphones.

With a bundled 4GB Memory Stick Micro card to go with the 120MB of on-board storage, Sony Ericsson has provided a decent amount of storage to kick off with. You can easily swap memory cards – the slot's on the side, under the back panel but not the battery.

For camerawork, the 3.2Mp shooter on the back is a limited device, with no autofocus, just an LED flash. It’s not up to Cyber-shot spec, but the user interface is straightforward and easy to use. The usual cameraphone adjustments can be made – white balance, exposure, image size and so on, plus options for multi-burst and panorama shooting. The phone display auto rotates into landscape mode when the camera’s activated, so you get plenty of viewfinder room.

Rough geo-tagging data can be added automatically to image files, with the W705 using basestation-based triangulation to get approximate geographical fixes on where shots were taken. The W715 uses GPS, of course.

Sony Ericsson Walkman W705

The camera's picture quality is mediocre

You may not bother in any case. Image quality is mediocre, with limited picture detail, though in decent lighting conditions, colours are accurately portrayed. The LED flash has limited effect in dark environments. Video capture is unimpressive too, shooting low quality footage at maximum 320 x 240 resolution at up to 15f/s.

Next page: Verdict

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