With the W880i it can ably be argued that Sony Ericsson have possibly
one of the best music-phones on the market as it covered all of the
major bases required in terms of portability and . With the T650i we
have its big brother and whilst not a direct replacement for the W880i,
(that's the W890i) the similarities are very difficult to ignore.
At only 12.5mm thick, the T650i is by no means the smallest handset
on the market, but it is compact enough to be comfortable and pocketable.
A sleek metallic casing is used over the outside and to top it off you
also have a screen finished in mineral glass - supposedly to prevent
scratches. This is a welcome addition there have been too many phones
of late where the screens are the most fragile part even though they
are clearly one of the most important. What many people may not realise
is that the casing itself is mainly plastic, but the outer coating is
metallic. This firstly helps in keeping costs & weight down (the
T650i only weighs 95 grams) and also adds an extra degree of protection
that entirely-plastic phones usually would not be able to.
Thankfully, Sony Ericsson are moving away from the use of a joystick
for navigation and replacing it with a much more conventional D-pad,
which is a far more suitable selection. Around this, you still see the
usual left & right soft keys situated under the screen and the back
and cancel key which Sony Ericssons are well-known though was strangely
omitted in the K850i.
The previously mentioned mineral-glass layer over the screen proved
to be an ideal solution to an increasingly irritating problem. To improve
this further, the quality of the display itself is excellent by Sony
Ericsson standards. Although Nokia do currently maintain a slight advantage
over its competitors, it seems that the rest of the pack are beginning
to catch up at last..
The keypad will seem familiar to anyone who's seen the W880i.
Though the keys are very small and do appear to be uncomfortable on
first glance, in practise the opposite is true. The small size of the
keys is to allow more space between each of them and this proves to
be a masterstroke as each key is perfectly responsive with typos proving
to be very rare.
As the physical construction of the unit is of such high-standards,
the technical specifications and features will need to be equally competent
to make it competitive and it doesn't disappoint. For data transfers
and video calls, you get 3G technology (though no HSDPA.) Also included
is Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and a USB port making sure there are plenty
of options for home PC data transfers.
Worth mentioning is the quality of the camera. Being a non Cyber-Shot
handset it can't be realistically expected to compete with the
K800 or K810i, but it does actually give a decent account of itself.
You still get autofocus and flash meaning that while it may not be able
to top the best 3MP cameraphones, it certainly is no disgrace either.
While the T650i doesn't isn't the most innovative of handsets,
it's proven to be a very capable performer that has covered enough
bases to be able to please many different fan-bases. The T650i is built-to
last, has a wealth of features and at the same time manages to be intuitive
and fun to use. Though there are better feature-phones out there, you'd
struggle to find anything that covers quite as much ground as well as
the T650i, just steer clear of the green, go for the blue instead.
