Sony Ericsson T650i - A Refreshing Phone Re-Do
The T650i is nothing revolutionary – it’s the Sony Ericsson T610i with some upgraded and updated features, and a newer, more modern finish. The basic format is the same – a square, blunt candy-bar format mobile phone, with a keypad with chunky metal buttons, and a bright screen. If you put it next to its predecessor, you’d be hard pressed to tell them apart.
The differences, while subtle, are quite telling. The processor running the phone is much faster; this results in a much sharper and more responsive screen display. The innards of the phone are now fully 3G, and as a result, there’s a VGA camera for personal video calling. The battery life has improved, and the screen resolution is sharper and much more vibrant. Particularly refreshing, given out battered out T610i was, the T650i’s front bezel is recessed the tiniest bit, and the screen is much more scratch resistant.
There’s a fully functional 3.2 megapixel camera on the back, and like the new bezel on the front, it’s recessed enough to lend a solid feeling of security. You won’t worry about breaking the optics. The camera takes passable photos – we have better camera phones, but this will certainly do, and if you’re tied to carrying a camera and a phone around, this is small enough and good enough to make you change your ways.
Like most modern phones, the T6501 runs the full gamut of being an MP3 player, and supports several other music formats. Its user interface for selecting tracks is good, and, as with all digital music players, sound quality is superb. The phone got good marks for how long you could talk (we registered over 8 hours in our benchmark tests) and we find the 13 days of “idle in your pocket” duration to be quite plausible.
On the down side, the flash memory options for this phone are the Sony Memory Stick, rather than the more conventional microSD chips used on virtually everyone else’s phone. Making matters worse, aside from the proprietary format, the one that comes with the mobile has a measly 256MB of storage, barely enough to give you music for a week of commutes. On the flip side, the headphones that come with the phone are, refreshingly, excellent in quality and sound dampening, and give a bone jarring level of bass.
As a phone, the device was particularly good at grabbing weak signals; enough so that it was noticeable. The internet and data connectivity was good, though the built in browser was somewhat lackluster. The onboard software for information contacts and tracking phone numbers is quite good, but not much changed from the T610i. Obviously, the idea was to not fix what isn’t broken, which is an attitude we wish more phone companies would make. Overall the experience with this phone was quite good, and if you’re already a T610i owner and happy with it, but looking for something with more modern capabilities, we can definitely recommend it.
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