Sony Ericsson TM506 (amber, T-Mobile)

The TM506's two-megapixel camera shoots photos in three sizes and two quality settings. Editing options include three color effects, a night mode, white balance, brightness adjustments, 18 frames, a self-timer, panoramic, multishot modes, and four shutter sounds plus a silent option. There's also a 2.5x digital zoom, but it's unusable at the highest resolution. Photo quality was quite nice. Colors were bright and images were sharp. You can further manipulate photos with the PhotoDJ application. Unfortunately, there's no camera flash.

The TM506 has satisfying photo quality.

The camcorder shoots clips in two lengths. Videos meant for multimedia messages are capped at 45 seconds; otherwise, you can shoot for as long as the available memory will permit. Editing options are fewer than on the still camera, but there's the VideoDJ application. Internal memory comes to 20MB of shared space, so we suggest using a memory card for extra storage.

Though it's not a Walkman phone, the TM506 has a well-stocked music player. Features include playlists, shuffle and repeat modes, stereo widening, and an equalizer with Sony's Mega Bass. Transferring music to the phone is an easy process through a USB cable, Bluetooth, or a memory card. The player interface is simple and utilitarian, but the controls are intrusive. You can activate an airline mode for listening to tunes while flying and you can send the music player to the background while using other phone functions.

We were pleased to see that T-Mobile included Assisted GPS on the TM506. Using the TeleNav service, you can get turn-by-turn voice-assisted direction, local maps, and traffic and a search feature for locating nearby points-of-interest and business. What's more, you can add geotagging information to photos that you take with the phone's camera. T-Mobile's GPS application is similar to AT&T's TeleNav. We'll have a review of the specific T-Mobile version soon.

You can personalize the TM506 with a variety of alert tones, screensavers, clock sizes, color themes, and wallpaper. You can download more options and additional ringtones with the phone's wireless Web browser. Games get demo versions of three titles: Tetris Mania, Are you smarter than a Fifth Grader?, and Midnight Pool. You'll have to buy the full versions for extended play. For more fun, the phone comes with a Music DJ application for composing your own ringtones.

Performance
As mentioned previously, the Sony Ericsson TM506 was the first T-Mobile cell phone designed specifically for its nascent 3G network. That means support for 1,700MHz and 2,100MHz AWS spectrum (both UMTS and HSDPA) on top of compatibility for slower GPRS and EDGE networks. Happily, that will give you wireless broadband support in North America and abroad. At the time of this writing, we weren't able to test T-Mobile 3G's network since it is not yet active in San Francisco.

We're disappointed that the TM506 supports only three GSM bands (850/1800/1900). As such, we can't call it a true 3G phone. We tested it in San Francisco using T-Mobile service. Call quality was decent overall. Voices sounded natural and the signal was relatively free of static interference. On the downside, the volume doesn't get very loud and the signal faltered somewhat in buildings and in underground stations. None of the problems was especially detrimental, but they were noticeable.

On their end, callers said we sounded fine. They could hear us well in most environments, though a few reported that the phone picked up a lot of background noise. Most could tell we were using a cell phone, but we didn't hear too many complaints about the audio clarity. Automated calling systems could understand us most of the time. Speakerphone calls weren't so good, however. The phone's speaker doesn't have great output, and at its highest levels, the sound on our end was tinny and distorted. Callers had trouble hearing us unless we were close to the phone.

Music player quality over the external speaker is about the same, so we'd recommend using a headset for the best experience. Even then, our tunes didn't sound fantastic, but the player is sufficient for short periods.

The TM506 has a rated battery life of 9.5 hours talk time and 10.4 days standby time. It has a tested talk time of 7 hours and 30 minutes. According to FCC radiation tests, the TM506 has a digital SAR of 1.43 watts per kilogram.