Six months can be all the time it takes for a handset to be considered obsolete or dead. All the while the mobile phone community had thought the Walkman handsets are all but dead. The last time Japanese/Swedish mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson released one was in the summer of 2009 with a W-line flagship, the W995, together with a budget W205 immediately after.
Then, nothing was heard about the W line. Its Walkman legacy was not lost, however, as it found its way in other lines using the Walkman players that supported MP3 and other audio file format. Find the latest Sony Spiro contracts online by comparing mobile deals from leading retailers.
But now, we have a couple of Walkman handsets that confirm the line was just hibernating, as there really was nothing special about Walkman phones to make them stand out even against the excellent music playback features of Nokia.
Even its early Walkman handsets were a farce among music phones as it didn’t even sport the most basic of basics in a music phone – a 3.5mm headphone jack. Any phone that doesn’t sport one can’t be seriously considered a music phone.
But now you have the Sony Ericsson Spiro that has one and its playback features certainly complete its picture as a music phone. And the nice thing about it is that it’s a low end handset that should appeal to the widest possible markets. You can get more info about the Spiro and many other phones by reading in-depth phone reviews.
Conventional Features
The Sony Ericsson Spiro is not a 3G phone, neither does it have WiFi or GPS. Housed in a compact slider form body with a lightweight 90g and a compact body measuring just 92 x 48 x 16.8 mm when closed, it’s not even a quad band GSM. It’s just a basic dual band GSM (900/ 1800) phone on the 2G network for Asia and Europe.
It gets a US version of its dual band GSM (850/ 1900) version. There’s the usual data connectivity with class 10 GPRS/EDGE for up to 236.8 Kbps on 2G for an acceptably fast online browsing speeds on a GPRS or EDGE data plan from your local carrier. It also comes with Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP for wireless local high speeds data transfers and syncing and microUSB 2.0 for the wired alternative.
Another indication of it low-end pedigree is an outdated imaging features where you only get a fixed focus 2-megapixel camera and nothing else. Video recording is there buy is not detailed in its spec sheet, so it must quite basic and not something to brag about. Even its display is a 2.2-inch TFT LCD display with QVGA resolution and 256k colors that are typical of many budget handsets.
Walkman Stand-Out Features
Where you get our money’s worth is its Walkman features. But it’s not as if we’re looking at cutting edge technology but just another refinement to distinguish its Walkman pedigree. You get a Walkman Player 4.0 which benefits from the usual TrackID which is one cool feature that lets users sample what they hear and the handset goes about looking at its remote database for the name and artist. It also has the usual PlayNow access for the latest MP3 files on its site.
So what stands out for the Sony Ericsson Spiro? Sony claims a feature that other handsets from other brands have – playing your music while getting in touch with your friends over at Twitter and Facebook. Okay, so it’s also a socially aware music handset. For a budget phone, it’s one great value alright if it comes out at less than ?100 this summer.