Sony Ericsson Spiro: Cheap, Cheerful And Well-made

By Author: Jerry Smith
Total Articles: 225
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In 2010, the most popular phones be touchscreen smartphones, but not everyone is willing to empty his or her purse for the latest high end devices. If all you need to do is make calls, send text messages, listen to music and connect to your friends on Facebook, then most mid-range, multi functional mobile phones will satisfy you, especially the latest released Walkman phone, the Sony Ericsson Spiro. It does all the aforementioned, plus it has Bluetooth, a basic camera and is cute and compact into the bargain.

From the appearance, the Sony Ericsson Spiro is definitely a hit rather than a miss, with a cute design and solid construction. The front of the phone has a glossy feel, while the back complete with a matte finish. The glossy front picks up finger marks a little too readily, but it does give the phone a sense of style. The matte battery cover can help prevent the device from slipping out of your hand during frantic use. The sliding mechanism is pretty solid, and on the whole the device feels incredibly sturdy. And this handset comes in four stylish colored casings which include stealth black, sunset pink, spring ...
... green & contrast black, so you can choose any color freely according to your own personality.

The Spiro is a compact handset, slide form factor, measuring 92mm in height by 48mm in width by 16.8mm in depth when in its slide closed position and weighing only 90g. On the front of the handset is the 2.2 inch colour screen. The screen is a standard QVGA TFT display, supporting up to 256,000 colours, with a resolution of 240x320 pixels. It presents some nice and vivid colors, but its viewing angles have some room for improvement.

The Sony Ericsson Spiro is equipped with standard messaging functionality with texts visualizing in threaded style. And it supports a predictive text input option, so you can input text when creating messages at higher speed as each word is predicted when you begin to type it. There are also Facebook and Twitter applications which provide a user friendly communication platform where the user can access their friends to share text, pictures, videos and status updates

There's one thing that the Spiro does well-music playback. The Walkman 4.0 player on the device supports multiple formats, including MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WAV, and there is also a stereo FM radio with full RDS support. Sound quality is quite decent, so long as you replace the bundled headphones with a better pair, since this phone includes a 3.5mm audio jack. Sadly, Sony Ericsson hasn't included dedicated in-line remote control with its 3.5mm connection, which means you need to remove the Sony Ericsson Spiro from your pocket whenever you wanted to change song. In addition, the inclusion of Bluetooth 2.1 also allows you to listen to your music on the move with a compatible wireless headset.

The Spiro'camera is possibly the weakest element of the entire package. The 2-megapixel shooter lacks a flash and produces very average shots. It also support video record capability. In terms of storage space, The device itself, offers only 5MB of internal memory capacity. This is compensated by the inclusion of a Micro SD memory card slot, with official support for memory cards up to 16 GB

When it comes to connectivity, there's no 3G or Wi-Fi, so surfing the internet will be a rough task - especially using the phone's clumsy web browsing software. But if you want to transfer data, there is also Bluetooth and USB connection options for you.

Overall, with the Sony Ericsson name behind it, you can be assured of a quality, feature packed mobile that will meet all of your needs. Sony Ericsson is the leader of the pack when it comes to the Walkman series of mobiles so you can be assured of getting a quality phone for the right price.
Jerry Smith, the editor of http://www.mobilephoneonly.co.uk. An expert on mobile phone and an observer of UK telecommunication market. He writes reviews on latest mobile phones, and also suggests promotional deals and special offers from mobile phone retailers in UK.