Sony Ericsson T303
Discontinued 4th March 2008
Where
has the Sony Ericsson T303 been for the past
few years? This seems like an odd question, but Sony
Ericsson's press photos show the handset is stuck in
2004, and a look at the feature set certainly reinforces
the impression that the T303 is a blast from the past.
Please don't misunderstand us - the
T303 has a lot going for it. It's a very compact device,
it has a long battery life and it looks good. But the
specification reads like a handset from a few years
ago. Indeed, the T303 is broadly similar to the 3-year-old
Nokia 6111.
The
Sony Ericsson T303 has a basic 128 x 160 pixel TFT display,
a 1.3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth and an FM radio. Overall
size is 83 x 47 x 15mm and the T303 weighs 93 grams.
That's quite a bit slimmer than the Nokia 6111, but
otherwise almost identical in size and weight.. and
features.
Bizarrely, the Sony Ericsson T303 comes
with a multimedia player, but just 8MB of non-expandable
memory. Yes, we did say megabytes and not gigabytes.
That's enough for about a single song and no more, so
really the media player is only useful to support MP3
ringtones. More usefully, the FM radio comes with
TrackID to help identify the song that is playing.
Talktime is an impressive 9 hours, with
up to 16 days standby time, significantly better than
the similarly sized Nokia 6111. There will be three
variants, the T303a is a 850 / 1800 / 1900 MHz GSM variant
for North America, the T303c is a 900 / 1800 / 1900
MHz version for China and the T303 is a 900 / 1800 /
1900 MHz version for the rest of the world (in previous
Sony Ericsson naming conventions, this would have been
the T303i).
It's an attractive looking phone, but
a very basic one - so price will be a key issue. Sony
Ericsson have not said how much the T303 is going to
cost, but we would say that anything more than £70
/ €100 / $140 or so SIM free would be too expensive.
The T303 should be available from mid 2008.
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Sony
Ericsson T303 at a glance
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Available:
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Mid
2008
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Network:
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GSM 900
/ 1800 / 1900 (T303 &
T303c) GSM 850 / 900
/ 1800 (T303a)
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Data:
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GPRS
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Screen:
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128
x 160 pixels, 65k colours
|
Camera:
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1.3
megapixels
|
Size:
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Compact
clamshell 83 x 47 x 15mm
/ 93 grams
|
Bluetooth:
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Yes
|
Memory
card:
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No
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Infra-red:
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No
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Polyphonic:
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Yes
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Java:
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Yes
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GPS:
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No
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Battery
life:
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7 hours talk / 16 days standby
|
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