Sony Ericsson G705

The Sony Ericsson G705 is a mid range phone with no extremely outstanding features to speak of, it just offers what most phones offered some time back. It does have a nice mix of features and also looks quite stylish. While there are many other phones which offer almost the same setof features at about the same price range, we will see whether there is anything that the Sony Ericsson G705 betters them at, in this detailed review. While it is no match for the superior Linux and Symbian based smartphones, if just basic features and style is what you need, the Sony Ericsson does seem like a nice deal.

Size and Weight :

The Sony Ericsson G705 has a nice sleek design and a slider form factor. At dimensions of 95 x 47 x 14.5 mm, it is pretty slim. xIt is also fairly light at just 98 gms, it is one of the lightest sliders available. While it looks quite nice, the build quality is just average. The body is mostly made of plastic, which has a okish feel, but feels a bit cheap compared to other phones with a metallic feel.

Network and connectivity:

The Sony Ericsson G705 offers up a premium web experience through something called turbo 3G, which pretty much brings all the online features of a fully functional computer to your handheld phone. The GPS reception is also good and a GPS lock down takes just a few seconds. The Google Maps application works quite nice, and offers two views – map and geographic. It also sports a lot of connectivity options like GPRS class 10, HSCSD, EDGE class 10, 3G HSDPA, USB v2.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g with DLNA, Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP etc. The bundled Netfront 3.4 HTML browser is quite good but not as good as the number one Opera mobile browser.

Camera and Video:

The Sony Ericsson G705 mobile phone is equipped with an 3.2 megapixel digital camera with LED flash and a Java-based OS and video capabilities, upload your favourite and funny moments straight to the web for friends all over the world to see. It can shoot images at a max resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. The camera quality is quite nice, just as you would expect from any 3.2 MP camera. The camera interface is much like the Cyber Shot interface and again offers many customizable features in an easy to use way. You can tweak the control shoot mode, picture size, LED flash, self-timer, white balance, and other effects. The LED flash is quite decent. The camera doesn’t sport autofocus which is a shocker coming from Sony Ericsson. You can also record QVGA video at a measly 15 FPS.

Memory and Display:

It has a Internal memory of 120 MB, Card slot Memory Stick Micro (M2). It can be expanded up to 8GB, 1GB card included. The front of the phone sports a 2.4 inch display with the ambient sensor, earpiece and secondary videocall camera above it. Below the display, you find a D pad with the usual array of control keys – the left and right select keys, the call and end keys and the shortcut menu and cancel key. The 2.4 inches TFT display comes with 256K colors colours. The display size 240 x 320 pixels.

Entertainment Features:

The Sony Ericsson G705 has nice multimedia capabilities it comes with the Music Player 3.0. The interface is nice and easy to use with nice visual effects and auto rotation. The audio player supports a wide range of popular formats like MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC +, WAV, WMA, M4A etc. It can be minimised and be run in the background with some other applications. The music player also supports the famed Megabass and stereo widening features. It also sports a custom EQ. It also has the TrackID feature using which you can identify and download tracks easily. The video player is also quite nice and supports all the basics like fullscreen viewing, fast forwarding, rewinding etc. It plays the MP4 and 3GP formats. You can also take screenshots of the videos and save them. The image gallery is also very nice and fast. It supports a lot of viewing modes grid, list, thumbnail etc just like the older versions. You can zoom into images and also view them as slide shows. You can also geotag the images directly and inscribe geographical coordinates on them. The G705 also sports the FM Radio with RDS.