Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman Review

We fell in love with the Walkman phones, when the W700i was launched, way back in 2006. Priced at Rs. 15,000, it was one of the hottest selling phones, back then, along with the W810i. A good six years have passed and now the Walkman series has come back with Android on board. Does this sequel spell success for Sony Ericsson, or does the Walkman brand fade into the oblivion? Let’s find out. 

Style comes cheap!

Design and Build Quality 

The Live with Walkman comes dressed in a soft white colour with shiny silver buttons along the sides and a bright orange Walkman logo. It’s extremely similar in looks to the Xperia Mini and has a similar footprint to the Xperia Active, which we reviewed earlier. 

The microUSB could have been better placed

The top consists of the Walkman button (for quick access to music), a 3.5mm jack, the Walkman light and the power ON button. The right consists of the volume rocker button and a dedicated camera button, while the microUSB connector is located on the left. The phone is quite small and, while we generally don’t complain about port placements, we’ll have to mention that we didn’t like the ‘bang in the centre’ slot placement for the charger. This means that when you’re charging the phone, there’s very little you can actually do on the miniscule 3.2-inch screen. Anyway, that’s just a personal rant. 

Moving on with the design, the phone comes with a VGA front camera, the proximity sensor, an ambient light sensor and the notification LED. Another minor question about the design - Wouldn’t it be great to club the notification LED and the Walkman LED into one? That way you’d have a slightly bigger and cooler notification light. The SIM card and microSD card are located underneath the 1200mAh battery, so there’s no hot swapping available.  

Comes in black as well

The Live has a predominantly plastic chassis, but it doesn’t look cheap in any way, if you’ll compare it to similarly priced handsets. The back and menu buttons are capacitive whilst the home screen button is a physical one. They’re all backlit, so if you’re a newbie with Android, you’re not going to lose your way in the dark. All the buttons have the right amount of feedback and feel to them. The phone might be slightly tiny, but it fits snugly into the hand and it’s got a weight of 115 grams, so it’s light as well. In terms of design and build, the Live with Walkman is definitely right up there against handsets in the same price category. 

The Walkman light

Features and Performance

Interface

The Walkman phone is powered by a 1GHz Scorpion processor and an Adreno 205 GPU, along with Gingerbread 2.3.4. Oh, and before we forget, this one is going to get Ice Cream Sandwich pretty soon, so it’s future proofed as well. The display has a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels and though it might not be like the vivid, Clearblack, or AMOLED screens, it’s bright enough for personal viewing. The four corner interface with the Timescape UI that we saw on the Active, makes a comeback with the Live.

The interface

If you’re unfamiliar with the interface then here’s a quick, short recap. The four corners of the screen allow you to hold shortcuts to applications. Upto four applications can be placed inside each arc. It’s neatly packed and doesn’t cram your homescreen. Timescape UI also means some really nice social networking integration onto one feed. There’s support for call and messages via the Timescape widget as well.