Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman Review

This is not the first time that Sony Ericsson tries to mix man and robot but this time it is not just about putting the W in Android. The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman is a component of the company's enduring endeavor to get their smartphones lineup up to date. The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman similar to its predecessor puts the music in your pouch without scratching the money out of it. It goes beyond other music player cell phones as it comes with a 5 MP camera phone and a Gingerbread-powered smartphone with all the right features intended for the money-conscious buyers.

Generally speaking, the Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman is meant for music lovers and seeks to keep on focused on matters that interest a apparently younger audience. As a matter of fact, both the xLOUD audio augmentation and TrackID are obtainable across the entire Xperia lineup, consequently no bonus points for the Live with Walkman.

To make a recognizable design more cheerful and eye-catching an apparent effort is made and to be precise it is its bright color branding and flashing lights. The conventionally superior social package in Sony Ericsson droids will be an additional bonus for the younger users. All these features make the Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman an ideal choice for the people it is designed for - younger audience. Furthermore, it is pretty reasonably priced package when compared with the features it offers. You could well be looking at free-on-contract deals too.

The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman measures 106 x 56.5 x 14.2 mm that does not make it the smallest phone in the town but yet it is pretty much compact and comfy to hold. It weighs a convenient 115 grams.

Advantages

• The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman weighs 115 grams that makes it convenient to hold.
• It measures at 106 x 56.5 x 14.2 mm.
• It comes with a recognizable styling of the new Xperia lineup.
• The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman offers comfortable handling.
• The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman has a 3.2" HVGA (320x480) display of 16M colors.
• On the other hand, there's a black color combo as well. The two versions of the phone bear different color accents.
• The Home button is supple but clicky, whereas the capacitive controls are well-defined, satisfactorily backlit and haptic enabled. All are extraordinarily comfy to use.
• The volume rocker and a half-press-enabled dedicated shutter key are featured at the right side of the phone which are well defined and affectionate with nice press feedback. The half press of the camera button is reasonably subtle and needs some time getting used to.

Disadvantages

• The display of the cell phone is not the Bravia-engine-powered Reality display of the Xperia mini.
• The garden variety TFT unit features fine brightness and delighting colors but poor contrast.
• Furthermore, the outdoor performance suffers the most.
• The Live with Walkman goes wrong to match the sunlight discern ability of the Xperia mini.
• Besides this, network video calls are not supported in the Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman however the front cam will work for chats on Google Talk or Skype.

The Live with Walkman battery is quoted at 14h of talk time in 2G and approximately 6.5h in 3G. For Standby mode, the battery time is quoted as 600h/850h in 2G and 3G respectively, with over 17 hrs of music playback. Obviously these numbers are little bit exaggerated and the battery barely last a whole day of heavy use. Or else, you can have it on stand-by for almost two days. The interface all in all is pretty much pleasing with flawless functionality and features that a walkman phone is supposed to hold.

Advantages

• The Live with Walkman offer pretty much satisfactory battery time.
• The overall look and handling of the Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman is great and with a neat and simple package, it does not feel cheap at all.
• It comes with a freshen up and much energized familiar design and the phone looks cool in white, even though the black combo has an attraction of its own.
• The interface response is satisfactory. Though, it feels zippy all the way through, maybe because of the lower screen resolution i.e. HVGA in place of WVGA or higher.
• The UI or User Interface is well optimized for the smallish screen.
• A better Timescape UI that brings all your communications under one hood: a comprehensive view of your SMS, MMS, email, call log, Facebook and Twitter updates.
• In addition, The Live with Walkman goes together with a 1GHz ARMv7 processor and 512MB of RAM. That is sufficient power to efficiently handle scores of apps. Gingerbread facilitates in this department as well and HVGA resolution entails the GPU possesses much less pixels to process.
• The visually customized phonebook can store up widespread information about all your contacts and Quick contacts are also enabled.
• Personalized ring tones and an option to redirect calls directly to voicemail is also available.
• Voice quality of the Live with Walkman is exceptionally good on both ends of calls, furthermore the earpiece is loud enough and calls are loud and clear even in noisy environments.
• The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman offers the default (Gingerbread) on-screen full QWERTY keyboard for text input in addition to a virtual numeric pad in portrait mode only.

Disadvantages

• Widgets cannot be ordered in mini screens, excessively small that you cannot essentially see what's on each of them.
• The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman comes with a poor screen contrast and viewing angles.
• Moreover, no smart dialing is offered in the Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman.
• No DivX / XviD video support out of the box.
• Memory card that comes with the Live with Walkman is non hot-swappable.
• The handset does not offer any custom equalizer setting.
• Besides no video call is supported.

The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman comes up to its name in our conventional audio output analysis. It set out some comparatively great scores and was realistically loud so the majority of users will have naught to frown at. The music player on the Live with Walkman is relatively the looker with a beautiful interface that is divided into four tabs for the available sorting options.

Advantages

• The music player on the Live with Walkman is fairly the beauty. The interface is presented in four tabs for the accessible classifying options: all artists, all tracks, playlists and albums.
• The music lovers will be pleased about the equalizer as it is a rich collection of presets. One or two custom-made slots would have made common sense - in spite of everything, the player wants something to rationalize its Walkman badge.
• The xLOUD audio enhancement, like all of the Xperia smartphones, is a setting that increases the loudspeaker volume.
• The FM radio that The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman is equipped with has a truly neat and easy interface that scans the area for the available stations without human intervention and puts "notches" on the frequency dial to make hopping to the next station easier.

Disadvantages

• Even though, the Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman bears the Walkman branding but you will not find any big difference if compared with Xperia line of phones.
• The only available visual image is the album art.
• Some degradation comes when headphones are connected, most particularly with stereo crosstalk and distortion levels. Although, these are not worse than the average that makes the Live with Walkman score a very good mark.

The cell phone offers a 5 mega pixel camera with a single LED flash along with a versatile dedicated shutter key, similar to those on Xperia active and the Xperia mini.

Advantages

• The Live with Walkman offers a camera with a very intuitive user interface.
• The quality of the images captured with the Live with Walkman is quite decent and produces photos with good color reproduction.
• Noise is very low.
• The video quality as pretty expectedly is on average with the mini pro, and the videos run smooth.

Disadvantages

• Although, the image quality is good but the amount of captured details is not so exciting.
• The results of the close-ups are not too impressive and phone over saturates the colors to the point where you cannot tell the difference apart.

The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman possesses quad-band (850/900/1800/1900) GSM network support. There's dual-band 900/2100 and tri-band 850/1900/2100 3G too, depending on region. You can depend on up to 7.2 Mbps of download speed. Wi-Fi treats the b/g/n standards and there is Wi-Fi hotspot functionality.

Advantages

• The web browser of the Live with Walkman does a great job thanks to Android 2.3 Gingerbread and the Adobe Flash 10.3 support.
• The Facebook app for Android is preinstalled and has all the functionality you need: photo uploads, comments, news feeds, groups and events.

Disadvantages

• Chances are that you will not use Facebook app all that much because of deep Facebook integration on the phone that keeps Facebook contacts are in the phonebook while Albums are in the gallery.

The Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman is at the deep down of the Xperia food chain. No disgrace in that as it is the phone that comes with the most youthful statistics and one that appears to recognize its target audience well. The cell phone looks good - not too decorative although young and fresh, reasonably priced without feeling despicable. Although, as a matter of fact, the Walkman branding appears a bit of a attention-grabber as the music player of the handset has nothing more to offer than the standard music players. Besides, the Walkman branding holds little to do with the real performance.

All in all it is a status symbol that offers something for the audience to recognize with. In addition, the Live with Walkman can get ease in the reality that it does not make things worse than an Xperia Arc. Furthermore, it does not only about the music player rather the majority of the features are accessible there as well as the solid social network integration is of special significance.