Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman review comparision full specifications with video

Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman review

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The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkmanattempts to fuse Sony’s famous-but-ailing Walkman brand with an affordable Sony Ericsson feature phone. Is it a harmonious duet or an off-key squawk? Read on to find out.

Verdict
It might be a reasonable touch-powered Walkman, but it’s not a particularly good phone

We love
Compact and solid build, four-tab interface

We hate
Clunky keyboard, sluggish performance

Specs
Screen: 3-inch, 400 x 240 resolution
Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, microUSB, 2G
Camera: 3-megapixel
Storage: 100MB, microSD up to 32GB
Battery: 1000mAh
Size/weight: 95.8 x 52.8 x 14.3 mm, 88 grams

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman is undeniably satisfying to hold. It’s got that solid, reassuring build quality that’s uncommon amongst budget phones, but which Sony Ericsson has always been good at.

It might be a little plasticy, but it’s well-creafted plastic that doesn’t flex or creak when squeezed. The phone’s rounded shape ensures that it sits pleasantly in the hand, too, and at just 88 grams it’ll sit lightly in any jeans pocket.

While it’s primariy touch-driven, the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman’s 3-inch screen is surrounded by physical buttons – the main Home button at the bottom (the one creaky/cheap component on display), a power/lock button to the left (which is disconcertingly spongey), two BlackBerry Curve-like music controls on top and a volume rocker on the right.

Screen and usability
The 3-inch screen itself is pretty snug by today’s standards, but with a rating of 155ppi (pixels per inch) it’s reasonably sharp for a budget phone. Suffice to say it’s well suited to the odd text message or Twitter update, but not so good for web browsing or video-watching.

The display’s reasonably responsive, though – and that’s because it uses capacitive rather than resistive technology. This makes it sensitive to slightest of touches, rather than requiring a certain amount of physical pressure before your input registers.

Combined with the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman’s four-corner interface – where a key command is situated on each corner of the screen – navigation initially seems reasonably snappy, but simply scrolling through menus soon reveals itself to be disappointingly jerky.

Usability isn’t too hot in other areas, either. Text input, for example, is terrible, relying on an old-fashioned multi-press input method, like you used to use to send text messages on your old 4 x 3 mobile keypad. It’s a waste of a capacitive screen – even one that’s just 3-inches big.

Camera
The phone is sluggish with more advanced tasks that we’ve come to take for granted on even entry-level smartphones, too. Take the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman’s camera. If you want to take a picture while listening to some music (it is a Walkman product after all), the track will pause for a good second or two while the picture is taken and processed.

The camera itself isn’t too hot either, as you might expect from a 3-megapixel unit with no flash. Video is noisy and blurry, so we wouldn’t recommend leaving home without your camcorder just because you have a Mix Walkman in your pocket.

In its defense, the phone benefits from a physical camera key, and the speed with which it boots into the camera app is surprisingly decent. Just don’t expect great results when you get there.

Media playback
Of course, the key feature of the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman is its status as an MP3 player, and it does this reasonably well. It’s packed with some half-decent earphones (though we would have preferred a set of buds), and the sound quality is passable.

One of the aforementioned hardware keys atop the device sends you straight to the Walkman app, so there’s no need for fiddling around in menus. Having said that, it’s a shame there’s no way to access your music from the lockscreen, and a press-and-hold fast-boot option would have been nice.

Ultimately, all these music features are neat, but hardly exclusive to the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman – any entry-level Android smartphone worth its salt will have decent music-playing capabilities and far more at a similar price. The Mix Walkman does have a few gimmicks in the shape of a Zap button, which lets you skip through the intros of each track for quick(ish) no-look track selection. Then there’s the much-publicised Karaoke mode that turns down the vocals to let you warble over the top.

These are hardly killer features, though. Ultimately, the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman is a reasonably attractive and compact dumb-phone that comes up short against pretty much any entry-level smartphone you care to mention.

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