New Comer

Introduction

The exciting new Sony Ericsson T650 pleases the eye, in a wink. A far descendant of the legendary Sony Ericsson T610/T630, the T650 is dressed to kill and packs in some serious high-tech ammo. It’s all there - 3G, TFT display with QVGA resolution, stereo Bluetooth, FM radio, a cracking 3 megapixel camera - and all those are fitted into a bar-shaped handset measuring only 12.5 mm in thickness. You may have heard of Sony Ericsson W880, well… meet his big brother. A serious promise, indeed! But i rarely take things for granted - join me as i get my hand all dirty while i put the Sony Ericsson T650 through its paces.

Main features

• Slim and stylish
• TFT display with a QVGA resolution
• 3 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash
• Memory card slot with hot-swap support
• 3G support with video calls
• Walkman-style music player
• FM radio

Main disadvantages

• Only 16MB internal memory
• No EDGE
• Records video in ancient QCIF (176 x 144 pixels) resolution only

An inspiring example of how a modern bar-shaped mobile should look, the Sony Ericsson T650 impressed me as soon as i set my eyes on it. The comparison to the Sony Ericsson T610/T630 will obviously be totally out of place here, since these handsets are more than outdated. You can look at the appearance of the T650 as more of a revival of the T-series, slammed into oblivion by the K-series. The probable reason for placing this new contender in the T-series could be that the K-series will be reserved for Cyber-shot handsets. Who knows! When we look around for competition, it is more than obvious that the T650 will be hitting hard on the Sony Ericsson W880 market share. i did like Sony Ericsson W880 when i reviewed it several months ago - at just 9.5 mm it surely looked the part. The Sony Ericsson T650 obviously hasn’t been on the same diet, but at only 12.5 mm thickness and with a sleek metallic finish, it doesn’t lose on looks either. Furthermore, it outperforms the W880 on a number of aspects. The Sony Ericsson T650 is a clear winner when it comes to comparing specs, but rest assured, i won’t just rely on that. It’s time that i roll up my sleeve and get on with project "Sony Ericsson T650 review".

Metal on the outside, plastic from the inside

The Sony Ericsson T650 will be selling in two distinct color variations - light green and dark blue . The one i got to test is obviously the green one. The T650 has a nice metallic body - exactly as advertised. Make a note here; i’ll get back to that aspect later on in the review. The handset measures 104 x 46 x 12.5 mm and weighs 95 g which provides for a nice feel when held in hand.

Above the display you can see the speaker in the dead center. The video calls camera is located on its right, while the ambient light sensor is on the left. The TFT display measures 1.9" in diagonal which isn’t quite what you’d expect in a higher mid-range tier handset. Just so you get a dimensional perspective, the W880 has a 1.8" display, while the K800 sports a 2" one. The manufacturer claims the Sony Ericsson T650 display is mineral-glass covered, which should prevent scratches. The keypad on the T650 has a great styling, the keys are small, and yet comfortable. Most of the Sony Ericsson users out there would be happy to see that Sony Ericsson have ditched the infamous navigation joystick and have replaced it with a sleeker D-pad.

The right side of the T650 incorporates the usual Fast port used for attaching the charger and all peripherals. The Fast port is getting relocated on the side of increasingly more Sony Ericsson handsets. I suppose that it has something to do with its increased use for plugging stereo headset for listening to music.

The bottom part of the T650 sports only a microphone pinhole and holes for attaching a neck or wrist strap. For that purpose you would have to remove the back cover first. The top part of the mobile features the On/Off key and a sliding release key for the back cover. The On/Off key is really minute but that doesn’t pose any usability problems.

The left-hand side of the T650 nests the dual volume key and the camera shutter key. They are all made to blend seamlessly into the handset design. The slight elevation plus the nice tactile feedback provide for a great user-friendliness of the controls.

The back side of the body has a nice brushed metal finish and the back panel represents one whole piece covering the back entirely. At the bottom you can see the loudspeaker grill. The camera lens and the LED flash are located on the top. The camera is advertised as having a 3.2 megapixel resolution but, as with some other Sony Ericsson products, its effective megapixel count is exactly 3.15 megapixels. The lens is located within a bulging black frame, which in our humble opinion spoils the sleek looks of the device.

Obviously without it the engineers wouldn’t have been able to fit a 3 megapixel module into the body. The immediate result from such a solution though might mean that the camera lens cover would easily get scratched or smudged with fingerprints.

Removing the back panel reveals something that we hinted at earlier on. Although the body of the Sony Ericsson T650 seems and feels metallic, underneath it’s plain plastic. Not a bad solution we might say - handsets with all metal structure usually pay a certain weight penalty and they go way over the 100g marker.

Now back to our lab mouse. When you release the back cover by sliding the release key located on the handset top side, several things may attract your attention. The M2 memory card slot is located on the left, not far from the Fast port. It allows (for) quick hot swapping of memory cards as you don’t need to remove the battery. The device can host Memory Stick Micro cards with a capacity of up to 1GB. The SIM card slot is located next to it. The SIM is removable with the battery off only. Forgive me for stating the obvious, i just couldn’t help it.

The Sony Ericsson T650 gets its juice from a Sony Ericsson BST-33 Li-Poly battery with a capacity of 930 mAh. Battery times are not yet officially published, but our test handset managed to endure almost 4 days of fair usage in a 3G network - so expect a decent overall performance from this puppy.

Usability checklist

The Sony Ericsson T650 provided us with a nice user-friendly experience. It handles nicely and the metallic finish is pleasant to touch. The handset fits perfectly in one’s hand and i’m pleased with the ergonomics of all the controls.

Sony Ericsson T650 held in hand

Talking about usability, we must pay due attention to the display. It’s been a while since i saw any improvements by Sony Ericsson in the display department. Nokia handsets have long been unrivaled when it comes to legibility under direct sunlight. Their patented hybrid electronic displays that consist of both light emissive and light reflective elements have been providing users with unsurpassed legibility under direct sunlight. Sony Ericsson have lagged behind in that respect and in fact they still do. The Sony Ericsson T650, however, offers the best display i’ve seen from Sony Ericsson so far. First off, it has a mineral glass cover to prevent scratches. Next, it offers improved usability under direct sunlight, and last but not least, it offers really attractive color effects. By color effects i mean that when looked from an angle, the T650 display changes colors in an instant. For example, the standard green color scheme of the user interface magically turns blue when you have a look from the right. The pictures below demonstrate the effect, or you can go back to the beginning of this review and take a look at the first pictures of the T650 taken from different angles.

Sony Ericsson T650 display in the dark: different viewing angles

The keypad of the Sony Ericsson T650 offers tiny square keys set sufficiently apart from each other. They seem to remind us of the controversial round keys of the Sony Ericsson K810. Much like the Cyber shot K810, these keys in fact provide for great user friendliness and are likely to be appreciated by keen texters. Responsiveness and tactile feedback are great and you can hardly make any typos since they are spread wide apart. The keypad is illuminated in white and with the added wave-like light effects it gains points both on usability and looks. More on those light effects is to come later on in the review.

Sony Ericsson T650 in the dark: focusing on the keyboard

So let’s hit the streets

Sony Ericsson T650 is without a doubt good at making and receiving calls - we wouldn’t expect any less than that. The loudspeaker is loud enough and you wouldn’t miss an incoming call even in noisy surroundings. You can hear cracks when you play a track with more bass at the highest volume level.

Calling our friend Dexter

Catchy user interface

The user interface in Sony Ericsson T650 is the standard non-smartphone Sony Ericsson user interface. Honestly, the user interface is becoming dismally familiar - almost 2 years now since they last upgraded it a bit. It offers great user-friendliness, but new mobiles equipped with it don’t offer any new functionality over previous models. Some of the new Sony Ericsson mobiles to be launched this year will have user interface with enhanced multimedia capabilities. And of course the addition of Flash Lite themes support to most of the new Sony Ericsson handsets will certainly liven things up.

As most previous models, the Sony Ericsson T650 comes with a dedicated Flight mode.

In active stand-by mode the screen displays information about the network signal, battery strength, current date and time, plus the next alarm that’s due. Pressing the navigation pad in any of the four directions can start a user-programmed feature or application. The main menu itself is made of a matrix grid with 4 x 3 animated icons. All sub-menus are in list view with tiny icons on the left side. Response is fast in every submenu and application.

Standby view • the main menu • a listed sub menu

Speaking about Flash Lite themes, it must be noted that the T650 not only comes with Flash Lite support, but additionally, some of the preinstalled themes are Flash-based. They change not only the color scheme and the wallpaper, but also the menu icons themselves. The home screen animations affect the keypad lighting in an intriguing way. When the animated flying boxes that come with the default theme hit the bottom of the screen, a light wave splatters across the keypad.

Three of the preinstalled themes

Almost all of the preinstalled themes can change their color scheme according to a built-in time schedule. For example, the basic theme featured a green wallpaper and green main menu icons for most of the day (10:00 - 19:00 actually). For about an hour after that a grey color scheme takes over before it eventually dissolves to blue at about 10 p.m. From 10 p.m. on, the theme goes really dark blue and won’t change before 07:00 when it starts gradually turning green going through several shades of blue. Overall, this is a nice effect, one that we’d like to see more often in Sony Ericsson handsets to come.

Changing colors according to the time of day

As with all recent Sony Ericsson handsets, the Sony Ericsson T650 has an Activity menu which has a dedicated shortcut key on the keypad. The Now running tab of the menu offers multi-tasking - for example you can run two Java applications and listen to the radio or to the music player simultaneously. The Activity menu also offers quick access to new events, the web menu and the My Shortcuts menu, which contains a list of frequently used features and can be modified to the user preference.

The four tabs of the Activity menu

Phonebook, as good as it gets

The phonebook interface is simple and straightforward. Either the SIM or the phone contacts can be set as default for the phonebook. Both lists cannot be displayed simultaneously. Otherwise, you can choose to use the handy option of duplicating any new contacts that you save in the phone’s memory to the SIM card. The maximum capacity of the phonebook is 1000 entries but you can save up to 2500 phone numbers - no change here. Contacts can be ordered by First or Last name. They are searchable by gradual typing of the desired name.

Contacts list • Free memory status

When adding a new contact, there are five positions available for phone numbers: Mobile, Home, Work, Fax and Other. This is the first tab of fields for the new contacts. The second one is for email and web addresses. The third is for assigning a picture, a custom ringtone and a voice command. The fourth goes for Title, Company and postal address. The last, fifth tab, is for additional information and birth date. Upon adding a birth date, you’re prompted to choose whether to add it to the calendar and set a reminder.

Contact details

As most other Sony Ericsson handsets, the Sony Ericsson T650 has a Voice Dialing feature. You can activate it with a longer press on the down volume key. In order to use it though you would have to prerecord your voice commands in a very quiet environment.

Call management

The Calls log is divided into four different tabs. They are: All, Answered (Received), Dialed and Missed. The tabs can take up to 30 call records altogether, which are shared between the separate tabs. When there are several calls made to a single contact, only the last call gets recorded.

Calls log

Texting comes easy

All messages, except emails, use one Inbox. No matter what kind of message has been received, it goes to the common Inbox. Only email messages have their own separate Inbox. The phone also offers an RSS-feed reader, using the NetFront web browser. When typing a message, there is a character counter, which would alert you when you get close to the 160-symbol limit. The T9 dictionary goes without saying.

Messaging menu • Write new • typing a SMS •reading an email

Excited about the music player, aren’t you?

Sony Ericsson T650 music player supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, WAV, WMA, M4A and MIDI file formats. It is the Walkman player version 1.0 used in Sony Ericsson K800 and K810 for example. In fact, most Sony Ericsson W-series handsets feature the same music player with several exceptions. The only difference between theirs and this one is that the latter doesn’t feature the MegaBass equalizer preset. Since Sony Ericsson T650 supports multi-tasking, the player can be set to run in the background. Sound is nice - as long you’re using the player with a good headset, that is.

Music player menu • The Now playing screen • player options

The video player of T650 is decent and videos can be watched in landscape mode. Unfortunately you cannot fast-forward videos. The player can zoom in your video up to 32x, in an attempt to make amends.

Playing a video: portrait and landscape modes

The integrated FM radio of the Sony Ericsson T650 has a memory for 20 preset stations and supports RDS.

Tuning in a station

Picture perfect

There is nothing new in the file browser department as well. It allows you to mark files (single or multiple), copy them, move them, and also create and delete folders as you please. There are three tabs of file lists - one for the phone memory files, one for the memory stick files and one shared for all files. By selecting a given tab you can filter the files shown. The integrated memory of the T650 is 16MB. There is also a Memory Stick Micro M2 memory card slot. The size of the memory card shipped in the retail package should be 256MB.

The phone memory tab • available memory space

Browsing your pictures is as easy as ever - you could do that in a list view with or without thumbnails. You can also view your pictures as a thumbnail grid of 3 x 3 or 5 x 5. The video files can also be browsed as thumbnails. Highlighting a video thumbnail won’t make it playing as a preview, as it did in Sony Ericsson K810.

List view • thumbnails list view • 3 x 3 grid view • 5 x 5 grid view

The interesting thing about the picture browsing is the Timeline view, which allows you to filter the pictures according to the month they have been taken in. After you specify the month, you could even choose the exact date. That sort of image filtering is offered by computer picture browsers and digital cameras. The Timeline sorting is seen more and more often lately in the recent Sony Ericsson phones.

Browsing March pictures • browsing pictures made on 3rd of March

The actual pictures can be viewed in portrait mode (just as you would on any other phone) or in landscape mode if you prefer. While you are going through your pictures the phone preloads a lower quality preview to allow your fast browsing. Pausing browsing once you’ve found a picture you would like to view in full, will result in loading it with its normal quality.

Viewing the pictures in landscape mode is much more natural

You can zoom in to the actual size of the picture or even more, up to 32x. Given the available megapixel count, zooming beyond 8x would rather produce smudged spots than reveal more details. While you are at zooming, a small mini-map of the picture appears to let you know exactly where you are on the photo.

Zooming in: 2x; 8x; 32x

While browsing pictures, you can easily do some basic editing or send them as MMS and email or via Bluetooth and Infrared. Should you choose more sophisticated editing, the PhotoDJ application is at your disposal. With it you can easily adjust levels, lighting, brightness and contrast, remove red-eye effect, apply some color effects to the picture such as negative and sepia, or add a frame or textbox to the picture. I’m pleased with its capabilities - it does great with removing red eyes without spoiling the whole picture.

Some of the available PhotoDJ editing options

Bulging 3 megapixels

The Sony Ericsson T650 comes with a 3 megapixel auto focus camera with a LED flash. The camera user interface is the same as the one we already saw in Sony Ericsson K550, W880 and K810. The camera is advertised as having 3.2 megapixel resolution, but as with some other Sony Ericsson products its effective megapixel count is exactly 3.15 megapixels.

Camera viewfinder • using the new camera keys • viewfinder interface

The camera offers night mode, self-timer, panorama, frames, and burst shooting modes. It also features white balance control and several scene-specific presets. Some color effects are available, too. The BestPic shoot mode is not present here, but then again, even the Cyber-shot cameraphone Sony Ericsson K550 didn’t have it. However, the Burst shot mode almost makes up for that.

When it comes to focusing, there is a dedicated macro mode and of course you can turn off the auto focus should you need to.

In our firmware version of the handset the shutter sound couldn’t be switched off via the camera interface; you can only change the sound type. The only way to deal with it is to switch the handset into Silent mode.

Some camera menu options

Judging the camera quality from a beta unit is a risky business, but we can safely assume that Sony Ericsson T650 will be inferior to the 3 megapixel Cyber-shot models K800 and K810. The resolution is about what we expected from the phone. The colors however are not quite right. You can see the strong red cast of the outdoor photos, but it will be probably fixed in the retail version. Interestingly enough out T650 performed excellent indoors – the color is right, the resolution is good and noise is under control. All in all – excellent results for a phone this slim.

Sample pictures taken with T650

T650 captures video at the low QCIF resolution. The options for the video camera are pretty much the same as those for the still camera with very minor differences. It’s about time Sony Ericsson upgraded the video recording capabilities of their mobile phones. Until that happens, i’ll stop publishing sample video clips taken by Sony Ericsson phones - there isn’t that much to see really.

As regards the functionality of the secondary VGA camera, i’m more than happy with it. The other party’s video feed is viewed in a large frame in the middle of the screen while you view your own image in a small frame in the lower left corner. There is also a possibility to view your own image mirror-like, meaning that it gets reversed and looks as if you are staring at yourself in a mirror. It’s much more natural that way. You can also zoom digitally your image at a 2x degree or choose to replace your live video feed with a picture of your taste. You can also do that during an actual video call and it’s handy when you want to show the other call party an interesting picture you have taken for example. The options don’t end here. You can also control the exposure compensation of the camera or even switch it into a night mode. There are 3 different video quality modes: Smooth, Sharp and Normal. Smooth delivers a smoother picture flow while Sharp provides more detailed images.

Video calls camera

Browsing away

Besides 3G and GPRS for fast data transfers, video calls and content-streaming support, the handset offers the usual connectivity capabilities such as USB, Bluetooth and an Infrared port.

As i tested, the integrated HTML Access NetFront Internet browser is good enough and does more than an all-right job. It has plenty of options - you can view the pages fullscreen with no menus showing and you can even browse your Web pages in landscape mode. It has WAP and picture modes. It supports content created for HTML 4.01, xHTML 1.0, CSS and Java script, WAP 2.0. The supported security protocols are SSL/TLS.

Generally, the Smart-fit function of the browser does well fitting the web content onto the screen. Scrolling is fast once the page has loaded completely. Our impression is that the Smart-fit function has got an upgrade and does a better job than the one in previous Sony Ericsson models.

Browsing GSMArena.com

Now let’s try browsing without the Smart-Fit function.

Browsing GSMArena.com with Smart-Fit off

The Sony Ericsson T650 supports Bluetooth 2.0 with the Human Interface Device (HID) profile, which allows the phone to be used as a remote control for PC and other Bluetooth-enabled devices. Furthermore, the phone could be used as a Bluetooth modem for accessing the Internet on a PC or notebook computer.

Bluetooth support also includes the A2DP profile, allowing listening to music on a stereo Bluetooth headset.

The T650 supports local and remote synchronization of contacts and calendar events. The local one is with Outlook and a PC, while the remote synchronization works with remote servers. The USB connectivity of the phone has two modes - one for file transfers and one for USB Internet - to put it simply, the second one is for using the phone as a modem.

You do the math!

The Sony Ericsson T650 offers many time-management features. There is an Organizer icon in the main menu and it contains several applications: Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Calculator, Synchronization, Timer, Stopwatch, and Light. The Calendar offers monthly, weekly and daily views. As i mentioned before, when you add a birth date in the phonebook, the phone prompts adding it to the calendar. Tasks can be two types: simple Tasks and Phone calls. Notes are written as simple as messages; T9 dictionary can be used here as well. The Light application let’s you control the LED flash and use it as a torch.

The Alarms are now part of the main menu. There are five alarm slots available. Each one offers a lot of options - you can choose to repeat the alarm on chosen days of the week or everyday. Text and a picture can be added to the alarm. Furthermore, the alarm’s behavior can be defined in case the time it is due to go off comes while the phone is in silent mode.

Organizer menu • Calendar • Alarms

The Voice recorder doesn’t have any limit to the duration of the recordings, since all the free memory is available for the purposes of the application. The Calculator is the regular Sony Ericsson one, which you have probably already seen. It offers the basic functions, no bells and whistles.

Voice recorder • Calculator

Some other applications include the MusicDJ and VideoDJ. VideoDJ is for making video clips from scratch or for editing existing recording using special transition effects and by adding background music. It can be a very amusing application. MusicDJ is a very simple application for creating custom polyphonic melodies.

Music DJ • VideoDJ: adding a clip and other media

As far as the additional applications are concerned, the Sony Ericsson T650 comes with AccuWeather Light preinstalled. You can get local weather forecasts but you have to download the needed data online.

AccuWeather: Choosing your region • Current weather for London • Options

Not exactly gaming-happy

There is only one game preinstalled in our test Sony Ericsson T650. I see the Lumines Block Challenge for the first time - it is a Tetris-like game with rather basic graphics. I didn’t find it intriguing, but of course, you can always download new games.

Lumines game

Final words

Well, that leaves one of the latest Sony Ericsson handsets, the T650, safely at the end of the gauntlet. This mobile will face the public’s high expectations and, as far as i can guess, it will have no problems meeting them.

I found the Sony Ericsson T650 to be a top-notch solution, able to meet most of your mobile needs, be it calling, texting, making pictures or listening to music - all that in an eye-catching form that won’t go unnoticed wherever you go. Probably the only disappointment you may have with it, is the low quality video capturing capabilities - QCIF video at 15 fps just doesn’t cut the mustard these days.

So after all is said and done, you bet the Sony Ericsson T650 is more than enough to keep you busy while you are waiting for the next Sony Ericsson headliner - the five-megapixel Sony Ericsson K850.

~ by irlandia2cool on November 10, 2007.