Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman Review

The 1GHz processor flexes its muscles in the interface department. Despite running a couple of applications, the Walkman phone showed no signs of slowing down. Besides the real world tests, we did some synthetic testing as well. In our AnTuTu benchmark test, the Live with Walkman scored a cool 2912 points – more than the Active and the DEFY PLUS, which are slightly more expensive handsets. In Linpak, this one got a single thread MFLOPS score of 38.228 and a multi thread MFLOPS score of 29.679. 

Benchmarks

Media

Well, it’s a Walkman phone, so the first and most important question that comes across anybody’s mind is how good is the music? The loudspeaker is well, LOUD and clear and will easily fill up a small area. Music via the headphones is crisp and clear. Though the bass didn’t have that thump we’d expected it to, the mids and lows are covered quite well with the headset that comes with the phone. We’d have preferred the in-ear headphones, as compared to the normal ones, but that’s just a personal preference. 

The Live with Walkman media interface is borrowed from Sony’s Xperia line up of smartphones. It comes with Sony’s xLOUD feature, a few preset equalizer settings and a sound extension tab that allows users to instantly search for lyrics, karaoke videos and song information. But guess what, you can’t manually adjust the equalizer settings to your liking, and no manual tweaking is definitely a downer for us. The Walkman light can be enabled via the menu button and it varies its flashing intensity, according to the beats of the music playing. It looks quite neat, but for us, it was just another battery sucker. 

Walkman FTW!

In terms of video, the phone is capable of playing back 720p videos (it records in 720p, so but naturally) but as usual limited codec support means you’ll need a third party player if format conversion sounds like a tedious job to you. The 3.2 inch screen is definitely small, but that’s the tradeoff at this price tag. 

Connectivity

The SE Live with Walkman is well loaded, in terms of connectivity options. It’s a quadband phone with 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. There’s DLNA, hotspot capability and a few dedicated GPS apps as well. Let’s have a look at each of these features.

Connectivity options

In call voice quality is good, just as we expected it to be. 3G works quite well and images load up pretty fast in the inbuilt browser. Flash is supported as well. Typing on the onscreen keyboard may be a problem, and you’ll have to get used to it, because if you have even slightly chubby fingers, you’ll be pressing the backspace more often than not.