nüvifone™. The navigation phone.
- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 95 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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28 out of 28 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
"Awesome looks and features, great quality, but earbuds suck. A great choice in this price range."
Pros: Looks; sony walkman; bluetooth; battery; interface; fast cpu; picture/video; music/photo/video mixing; voice recorder
Cons: Poor earbud design; fish scale keys; connection prongs
Summary: This phone looks and feels so nice, you'll hate yourself the first time you drop it. But once you do, it will sill work (I can attest to this). The design is very sturdy, with a very large hindge, and the battery cover will never fly off.
The fish scale key design will throw you off once and a while, so if you're a big texter, don't bother, especially if you have fat fingers. Worst are the mp3 and power buttons, which are extremely and needlessly small.
The screen is a tad smaller than others in this $ range, but does look sharper because of this.
The external screen is cheap, but looks nice anyway and can be read under heavy sunlight. However you have to press a side button first, which can be annoying, especially if you just want to change songs. But i guess the extra battery life is worth the extra button press.
Speaking of the battery, it's the best of it's competition. I did alot of research when shopping and the battery was this phone's biggest plus. Requires a 2 hour charge every two to three days under heavy usage. This was a great sale incentive for me because a dead battery makes for a very useless phone/mp3 player.
Yes the camera is only a 0.3 megapixel, but that's why you get a nice mp3 phone like this for so cheap. It's still fun to use due to the large memory capicity and included computer transfer cable. And it comes with all the features of the expensive cameras. Pics are 640x480, and videos are fun to shoot. The phone comes with MusicDJ, PhotoDJ, and VideoDJ. All are easy and fun to use, especially VideoDJ.
The phone has a whopping 22 megs of memory, and M2 card slot for an included 512 megs. You can fill the card with music and still have lots of room on the phone for pics and vids.
The feature full mp3 player works and sounds great, and comes with a 1 foot cord with a handsfree answer button and a headphone jack. But I had to buy some new buds because the included ones would not fit in my ear properly. The design of them requires that you jam them into your ear cannal, because they only sounded good when I got them 'air tight' in my ear (but then they sounded phenomenal). Otherwise they just sit in your lobe and sound crappy and extremely weak. Who jams earbuds into their ear cannals? No thank you. Obviously for me, the earbuds were the biggest draw back.
The phone's interface is slick and very fast. It includes several themes, and I got pleanty more for free from sony ericsson's wireless website. (Make sure your carrier doesn't rape you for downloading them)
No problems with the phone's signal, but I imagine the internal anttenna might be fussy out in the boonies. Depends on your carrier I think.
The phone has one connection for the USB, charger, and headphone cables, which is why I question the little plastic prongs on each that secure the cables in. They're designed to pop out incase they are bent the wrong way, but I'm not sure they will last the couple of years I want them to. I will just have to be careful and see.
A word on this phones competition, all of which cost the same and have identical features(except the T609 which sports a 1.3 megapixel camera):
-Samsung T609: smaller screen, poor battery, propietary headphones.
-Motorolla V361: poor design, terrible performance reviews, propietary headphones, its a motorolla.
-LG CE500: No handsfree capabilities, no video
It was a tough choice between the Sony and the LG (I like the LG's built in headphone jack), but ultimately the W300i is by far the better looking phone. Thanks for reading.
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