It’s a Phone! No, a Camera! No, a Walkman! Call Me
A few weeks ago I bought a new cell phone. Why I didn’t replace the piece of junk that I had been carrying around for 6 years sooner is a mystery to all. Really, that thing needed replacing from the moment I bought it. I even lost it for several months and it only resurfaced when I was about to call to cancel the service.
I decided on a Sony Ericsson W300i. It was a tough decision. The truth is I only need a basic phone. My primary concerns are battery life (since my old one had none) and signal strength (since my old one had none). Beyond that everything else is gravy.
It is surprisingly difficult to buy a phone that doesn’t also contain at least two other digital devices. I find this quite odd. Why wouldn’t a phone manufacturer put some development into making a phone that has a skookum antenna so that it has awesome range? How about making the interface as click friendly as possible?
Do people really use the camera on their phones for anything worth keeping? I’m honestly curious, because I own a digital camera that is as small as my new phone and it takes amazing photos. So far, I have been less than impressed with the phone’s camera quality.
Just last night I discovered it is also a video camera. I suppose it would do in a pinch if my baby was doing something enormously cute and the other video recorder wasn’t available but I don’t think it’s quite DVD quality yet.
My phone is also the 00’s version of the Sony walkman, complete with radio. So it can store music like an iPod and play it back on a semblance of a speaker, or through a headset. Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that it stores all the music in such a way that when you’re trying to set the ringtune you can see all the songs. Not that you can set any song to be a ringtune, which makes their placement most peculiar.
And speaking of ringtunes, I was a little disappointed to discover that it only came with two built-in tunes and the rest you have to download from the Sony Ericsson site. Which wouldn’t be so bad, if a little inconvenient, except you have to do it with the phone and since my cell plan does not include internet access I can’t do it. And believe me I tried! I tried many a trick to get the files on my computer hard drive to transfer (much like the MP3s) but no luck.
That’s another thing my phone can do, even if my plan doesn’t allow it. It is a web browser. I can’t really comment on how well it manages this task, but it does have a button dedicated to a feature I won’t ever use.
I have noticed that the buttons are so flat as to be nearly indistinguishable from each other which has caused a few wrong numbers to be dialled. But it does have voice activation if I can ever find some time to set it up. Maybe I’ll program it to phone home if I flip it open and say “Beam me up!”
It comes with a USB cable and when I hooked it up it immediately asked if it could download my contacts from Outlook. Since my old phone had no SIM card this saved me a lot of time inputting phone numbers. It can also sync to other Outlook data like calendar appointments and notes. Of course, it has text messaging and also webmail.
I was close to buying a Motorola Razr. I’m very fond of Motorola products, as I’m an alumnus employee. My husband was pushing the Sony (coincidently, he’s an alumnus Sony employee). In the end it came down to feel in the palm of my hand. The Sony Ericsson just felt better.
I’m really enjoying my phone, the extra bells and whistles notwithstanding, and I hope to use it a lot more than the Jurassic junk I was not really using before.