Sony Ericsson W710i Mobile Phone Deals
The Fitness Phone Joggers Will Love
Not many readers will remember when a mobile phone weighed upwards of a kilogram, and had all the chunky stylings of a Soviet era apartment building. You can see one of the slimmer, sleeker phones from fifteen years ago by watching the opening of the movie Speed, where it looks like Keanu Reeves is carrying a vinyl covered brick. I remember those days, when lugging a phone meant lugging a lead acid battery.
Nowadays, mobiles aren’t exercise equipment so much as personal gadgets that do everything; as the feature lists approach ubiquity among all the vendors, each manufacturer is trying to find a new niche to take their product in to maintain brand identity and uniqueness, trying to give you a reason to buy their mobile the next time you upgrade or sign a new contract. Sony Ericsson’s W710i is a case in point.
Rather than try to coax you into paying your sterlings for a new camera (since even the cheapest mobile phones give a 2 MP snapper these days), or trying to convince you that their built in MP3 player is better than the others (they’re nearly identical now), the W710i includes motion sensors that let you use the phone as a pedometer, and you can enter your body weight in and get calories expended by walking as an output. It’s an interesting niche, and one we expect to see some competition in, soon.
The W710i is a clamshell form factor, and opens up to a 160 mm long length (it folds to about 90 mm), and is surprisingly thick and chunky for something of its price. The screen is bright, and while some would say it’s too small, it’s more than adequate for what any sensible person would ask of it. The menu system is comparatively clear, and there’s lots of places for you to put in biometrics for its performance data applications. It also has the regular instances of things we’ve come to expect in a phone – contact and personal information manager, the ability to play MP3s and an FM radio. It does not have a snapshot camera, which is the only “conventional phone” feature we’ve found that it’s lacking. It is a bit on the chunky side, but it fits nicely into your hand.
It’s a full quad band handset, and has IR and bluetooth capabilities. My general take on using the phone for two weeks is that it’s nice enough to use, and the “workout phone” elements don’t detract from using it as a day to day phone. I could wish that it had some sort of GPS tie in to give you mileage counts when you run, but no doubt that will be added to a future (more expensive) model. It appears to be a first venture into a new niche, and if it does well, we can expect expanded models with ever more features to come through. They’re going incrementally with this, trying not to remove features necessary to make it a good phone, while adding ones to improve market niche and market share.
Overall – if you’re looking for a pedometer that you won’t leave on the kitchen counter, the W710i adds just enough functions to be useful without being overwhelming, and without sacrificing too many of the added features we’ve come to expect from a modern mobile phone.
You might also be interested in: Sony Ericsson K530i cash back and free gift mobile phone deals or just compare the cheapest free mobile phone contracts and offers
