Sony Ericsson G705 Product Review

Smartphone, entertainment phone, music phone, budget phone…take everything from these categories of phone and we get the Sony Ericsson G705 – a phone that seems to hit on the right spot. Is it as excellent as everyone anticipated? Let’s find out now.

The package contains the phone, a charger, a battery, a handsfree, a CD rom & manual plus a USB data cable. The package is pretty standard, which is to be expected of a budget phone.
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Is it a slider phone, a touchscreen phone or a slab phone? At 14.3mm thick, it is unbelievable that the phone has a slide-out numpad under its belly.
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Here are the usual buttons. I like the golden answer/reject buttons and the central button a lot, since they add some liveliness on the otherwise dull layout.
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The keyboard isn’t terribly long when extended. The keys are reasonably soft with a shallow drive.
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The right-most column of keys have some special functions in web browser. From top to bottom: bring up the URL box, favorites, home, and zoom. The purple backlight is turned on automatically when the browser is launched and it looks cool in dark area. Perhaps Sony’s engineers have better eyesight, but to me the icons are too small to convey any meaning, they all look like a tiny purple spots to me.
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The button on the top is used to bring up the last music application you have just used. It is so tiny that some people may find it difficult to reach.
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The back of the phone has the usual metal finish. It feels quite cold in the hand (especially in winter!) but it looks tough, too. The 3.2MP camera features geo-tagging, instant upload to blogs, and a LED flash but not auto focus!
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More M2 card device! The Sony-designed M2 cards continue to plague Sony Ericsson phones with its high cost and capacity limitation. Of course, M2 cards have gotten cheaper in recent times but I am puzzled by Sony’s continuous support in this dying format.
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The Sony Ericsson G705 has aGPS, Wayfinder Navigator and Google Map installed. Sony Ericsson’s move to include an aGPS appears to be an imitation of what Nokia had done on their middle-to-high end phones. Don’t get too excited though, since the screen will be too small for showing the next three streets, the aGPS is confined to finding out shops around you.
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Web browsing is the strongest selling point of the phone. The screen is bright and crisp and the browser loads web pages reasonably fast. It has no difficulty in displaying complex web pages (e.g.: www.plemix.com) and I like the zoom feature a lot. The zoom feature “zooms out” first, and a red box appears on the screen. You can move it with the joystick, press the central button to “zoom in”. Everything originally inside the red box will be loaded in full size to the screen. The web page is rotated automatically depending on whether it is held in landscape or portrait mode.
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The web browser is fitted with a lot of features to help you read the web pages more efficiently. Reading a 800 x 600 pixels web page naturally involves a lot of panning and zooming on the 240 x 320 pixels screen of the phone, so the Sony Ericsson G705 has various methods to help you achieve that.
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The Sony Ericsson G705 has the hardware of a smartphone (HSDPA, aGPS, and Wi-Fi), media capability of an entertainment/music phone, and a price tag of a mid-range phone. While it packs a hefty set of features, not many of them are truly useful. The web browser is nice for some emergency browsing, but I would certainly not want to surf the net often with a 2.4” screen. The camera is strong on the software side, but the lack of auto-focus is a big disappointment, I imagine it was sacrificed in favour of the thinner design. Instead of seeing it as a smartphone, or even a mini-computer, it is best to view it as an ordinary phone with some nicely added features.