Sony Ericsson T715

Discontinued
25th June 2009

The Sony Ericsson T715 is a compact 3.5G slider phone. Despite the T715's old-style number (rather than a name), this is one of the latest generation of Sony Ericsson phones that comes with a microSD memory slot rather than the proprietary Sony slot of older handsets.

The problem that we have with the T715 is that it is desperately hard to find something interesting about it. We're not saying that this is going to be a bad phone, just that it's about as bland as a plate of plain tofu.

Measuring 92 x 48 x 15mm, the T715 is what Sony Ericsson call a "credit card sized" phone. Although it's more compact than the similarly specified W705, the main drawback is the smallish 2.2" display where the W705 has a 2.4" display.

There's a large, easy-to-use keypad. Sony Ericsson also say that the Tofu.. sorry, T715 has large fonts that are easy to read as well.

On the back is a 3.2 megapixel camera with a photo light. The camera can also geo-tag photographs with their location, using the nearest mobile base station as a fix because it doesn't have GPS. The main camera can also be used for video calling, which isn't exactly useful for face-to-face communications.. but how many people actually do that anyway?

The T715 comes with the NetFront web browser, supports standard internet email plus Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, it has a multimedia player and FM radio plus a YouTube viewer. Picture and video blogging is supported as standard, and the T715 comes with a set of personal information management applications.

This is a quad-band GSM phone with support for 2100 MHz UMTS in Europe and most other countries, there will also be a T715a variant with tri-band UMTS support for North America. The T715 supports high-speed HSPA uploads and downloads, although Sony Ericsson have not quoted any data transfer speeds for this.

Talktime on 3G is about 4 hours with about 14 days standby time. On GSM the T715 has 10 hours talktime and 16 days standby time. How many people actually disable 3G on their 3G phones? Not many.

We said that the T715 is like tofu. But some people love tofu. We're certain that the Sony Ericsson T715 will do pretty much everything that you need, but frankly we would prefer something a little more tasty.

The T715 should be available during Q3 2009. No pricing was given, but we would anticipate that the T715 will retail for €250 or less SIM-free.