Sony Ericsson F305
Discontinued 17th June 2008
Coming up with the next big thing in mobile phones
is always pretty difficult. Your marketing department
has to think up something clever, and engineering have
to actually make it work. In the case of the F305 we
can only assume that the marketing department has been
terribly impressed with the Nintendo Wii and have tried
to do with same thing with the mobile phone, and this
is certainly an interesting engineering challenge.
So, what Sony Ericsson have produced is the F305
slider phone. This comes with a built-in motion sensor
so that it is used something like a Wii remote controller.
The F305 comes with three games to take advantage of
this, "Bowling", "Bass Fishing"
and "Jockey" plus a number of others that
are presumably a little more traditional.
Apart from the motion sensor, the F305 is pretty
standard. There's a 2 megapixel camera, 2" 176
x 220 pixel display, expandable memory, dedicated gaming
keys, stereo Bluetooth, a multimedia player and F.M.
radio - which we would say categorises this as a "lower
midrange phone". One interesting feature is the
CPP-100 power pack which can be used to boost the phone's
battery when you are away from a mains socket.
Despite
the cleverness, we think that this is a deeply flawed
product. Although the concept of Wii-like gaming on
a phone is tempting, remember that the Wii outputs to
a TV, the F305 displays on the phone itself.. which
of course is difficult to see while you're waving the
handset around. Even though the F305 comes with a wrist
strap in the box, the Wii remote also comes with a protective
jacket so it is much better protected - and a mobile
phone is quite an expensive thing to drop. Worse still,
the F305 is an utterly unremarkable phone with a relatively
small screen and limited resolution display - hardly
features that will make gaming fun.
There is perhaps some mileage in this concept - but
surely the motion sensor should be in an accessory rather
than the phone, and gaming really needs at least a 2.4"
display. As it is, we suspect that the F305 will follow
Nokia's N-Gage
into gaming oblivion.
If you really want one of these, then Sony Ericsson
say that the F305 should be available during Q3 in "polar
white" or "mystic black", although no
pricing information was available at the time of going
to press.
|
Sony
Ericsson F305 at a glance
|
Available:
|
Q3
2008
|
Network:
|
GSM
850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
|
Data:
|
GPRS
+ EDGE
|
Screen:
|
176
x 220 pixels, 262k colours
|
Camera:
|
2
megapixels
|
Size:
|
Medium
slider 96 x 47 x 15mm
/ 98 grams
|
Bluetooth:
|
Yes
|
Memory
card:
|
Memory
Stick Micro
|
Infra-red:
|
No
|
Polyphonic:
|
Yes
|
Java:
|
Yes
|
GPS:
|
No
|
Battery
life:
|
8 hours talk / 29 days standby
|
|
|