Sony Ericsson F500i

Discontinued
24th June 2004

Sometimes handset manufacturers like to keep something up their sleeves for a surprise announcements, and we certainly won't expecting the Sony Ericsson F500i which is manufactured exclusively for Vodafone.

At first glance it's difficult to work out where the F500i is pitching itself, and our best guess is that this sort of competes with the recently announced Nokia 3220 in providing a fairly basic but fun phone with the younger market in mind.

Roughly similar in size to the venerable Sony Ericsson T630 and T610 series, but with looks inspired by the new K700i plus a little bit of the T105, the  Sony Ericsson F500i is a pretty standard phone in technical terms, with a 160x128 pixel display in 65,000 colours, a VGA resolution camera, tri-band GSM, Java, polyphonic ringtones, GPRS plus 10Mb of internal memory and frilly things like ringtone mixers and 3D animations.

Despite some interesting things in the speaker and camera department, the F500i is nothing special and is primarily an exercise in packaging up common components for a target marketplace.

We're not saying this is a bad phone, because it appears to be pitched firmly at the value end of the market, and what Vodafone and Sony Ericsson have done is come up with a package that integrates some fun features with the Vodafone Live! service and come up with something perfectly marketable, where you can pretty much guarantee that everything will work out of the box.

We expect to see this pitched at around €250/£150/$280 SIM Free and €160/£100/$180 on prepay, free on most contracts. Sony Ericsson and Nokia are saying that this phone will be available in July 2004, but we wouldn't be surprised if that date slips a little.