Sony Ericsson C510 Mobile Phone Review - The Cyber-Shot Bargain Box

As a competitor to the Nokia 6600 Slide or the Samsung Soul, the Sony Ericsson C510 (Released Feb 2009) holds its own and is one of the best in its price range.

With 3G HSDPA internet access, the C510 puts Sony Ericsson back on track when to comes to delivering a phone of decent reliability and features for the price. Time alone will tell whether they will regain the edge with their products, but until they are proven unreliable, we have no problem with the phone we are reviewing here today.

For one thing - we have a phone which can produce print-quality photographs - if care is taken. While the camera is a 3.2 megapixels, as opposed to those which are 5 and 8 MP in size - it also only costs half as much. It offers autofocus face detection, Smile Shutter™, LED flash and digital zoom with the added bonus of geo-tagging. Video is also possible with this phone, as is video calling.

Photos can be improved using the Photofix application, then sent to Blogger, MySpace or Picasa Web Album in a few clicks. Panorama shots are possible in VGA quality.

For purposes of interconnectivity - the Sony Ericsson C510 works on both 2G and 3G networks, on GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 (2G) and HSDPA 2100 (3G). Two other dedicated models of the C510 cater for America and China Mainland usage.

Messaging capability includes SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email and Instant messaging. The phone has FM Stereo radio with RDS, games with the ability to download further games and runs Java MIDP 2.0.

It supports MP3/AAC/MP4, and sports TrackID music recognition, YouTube service in the Media Center, an Organiser, Voice memo/dial (and speaker phone) and Motion Gaming.

Battery capacity is up to 400 hours standby on 2G and 250 hours on 3G. Talk time varies between 10 hours (2G) and 4 hours (3G). It uses a standard Li-Ion battery.

Inside the box, we find TFT display with 256K colours, a pretty typical screen of 240 x 320 pixels in size which measures 2.2 inches. The Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate when viewing pictures in landscape and portrait mode makes photos a pleasure.

Under the bonnet, the handset has 100MB internal memory and the Memory Stick Micro (M2) card slot allows increasing memory up to 8GB - more than adequate for most use. The phone records up to 1000 x 20 field in the phonebook, photo call and records up to 30 received, deleted or missed calls.

In terms of data handling, the phone works with Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 - 48 kbps GPRS, and Class 10, 236.8 kbps Edge. It has HSCSD, 3G on HSDPA and HSUPA and v2.0 Bluetooth capability and USB. It does not have WLAN or an infra-red port.

What we didn't like about it

As per usual, Sony Ericsson has failed to include a 3.5mm industry standard jack plug, the charger, earphones and USB cable all use the same connection space, severely limiting the handset - for examples, the earpieces have to be unplugged to allow downloading through the USB port.

Smile Detection only works when the face is in focus - with the time lag involved - this does not always work well.

What we did like

These days we all seem to expect GPS as a basic part of our phone system - the Sony Ericsson C510 does not offer this facility - however - we liked the fact that we could purchase it as an optional add-on. Not everyone needs GPS, and we liked the choice given with the cheaper handset price with the built in Google Maps.