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Sony Ericsson, a pioneer in Music mobile phone technology, its F305 Gaming Mobile phone is not only light on pocket but also comes with power packed features like motion gaming, media player, FM player, web surfing and an integrated camera to store movies and pictures of your loved ones.
Targeted for youth, Sony Ericsson has put gaming at the heart of its F305 model. With 96 x 47 x 14.6 mm in dimension, it can be easily carried in your pocket.
Outer Design
We got a cool looking Sony Ericsson F305 slider phone for testing in More labs. Sony Ericsson has fabricated this phone with great care; the white ceramic plastic body definitely gives the phone a sleek and neat look. Sony Ericsson F305 comes with a small 2-inch display screen that delivers decent image quality. This phone is mainly targeted for youth and the two round buttons above the 2-inch screen with letters “O” and “X” makes me remember something, yes! I have seen these buttons before on my Playstation’s gamepad. There is a button with Playstation gamepad engraved on the lower-left of the D-Pad on the phone, which quickly launches all the games available on the phone. The gaming buttons are very prominent and are very easy to spot even in low light because of their design and backlight. Other than this the phone has menu and music buttons right below the screen and calling and canceling buttons on the left and right of the D-pad respectively. Its alphanumeric keypad is hidden which can be seen by sliding the screen upward. On the right panel of the phone you will get a camera quick launch button and zoom-in or zoom-out buttons. The buttons on the phone are well placed keeping all the aspects of ergonomics that we didn’t feel any discomfort during usage.
2MP Pixel Camera
Sony Ericsson F305 comes with a 2MP camera that can either be invoked by navigating through the phone menu interface or by pressing the camera shortcut button situated on the right side of the phone. The 2MP camera sports an easy to use interface that offers two camera modes: Normal and Burst Mode. In Normal Mode the camera performs normally and the zoom is disabled but in burst mode, a user gets more control on the camera. Using this camera, you can take pictures with a resolution of 1600x 1200 pixels. Sepia, Negative, Black and White and Color picture modes are available in this phone to enhance your photographic skills. Overall, the quality of pictures taken with F305 camera were passable, a little bit of noise was seen in the pictures. Using its built-in feature “Photofix”, we tried to fix some pictures but still noise was visible in the pictures.
Gaming
As we have told you before that SonyEricsson has introduced F305 as a full gaming phone, so as gaming enthusiasts it will be a bad thing if we do not discuss games that comes with this phone especially when this phone is offering Motion gaming so that you can control games with the flick of a wrist or the swing of an arm. The phone comes with 11 pre-installed games like Bowling, Bass fishing, Jockey, JC Does Texas, Tropical Madness, Racing Fever GT, The Sims 2, Jewel Quest 2, Lumines Block Challenge, Asteroids, and Quadrapop. Let’s check some games that we especially like in this phone.
The Sims 2
It is one PC popular game that revolutionized the PC gaming once and for all and now it is available on F305. In this game, you can socialize with other virtual characters by either playing a male or a female character. In this game your character can make new virtual friends, eat, sleep, take care of their hygiene, get into a relationship, go to job and do all the chores that we do daily but only in a safe environment and within the confines of your phone.
Racing Fever GT
In this game, you ping-pong between three major events. There’s the crash derby, where you try to run as many microbuses off the road as you can; the car jump, where you gather boost power-ups and blast into the ether off of wooden ramps; and the two-wheeling events, where special wedges in the middle of the road boost you onto one side of your car, and you try to hold the position as long as possible.
Bowling
Motion Bowling is a very nice game and now you can hit the targets with the swing of your hand. Just bring the handset towards your face and than by tilting the handset set the direction of the ball and then press the launch button so that the ball can hit the targets.
Bass Fishing
Black Bass is a game fish known for its large size in North America. Now you can catch this fish with F305. For playing this Motion sensing game, just swing your hand forward to cast a fish line, after some seconds when the fish is hooked than tilt and twist your handset to catch the fish. At first catching a fish was not easy but soon we caught some really fat ones, but unfortunately we can’t cook them.
Jockey
Becoming a jockey is one thing but taming and riding a horse is another thing, both are very difficult things in real life. But now you can not only ride a fast horse but you can be a jockey as well. SonyEricsson phone comes preloaded with Jockey game that supports motion gaming. Just tilt your handset forward to increase horse speed, tilt left or right to move left and right on horseback. Just repeat these movements on every stage and you are a winner.
JC Does Texas
An amusing game, in which Johnny crash has to do some missions by becoming a human cannonball on his vacation to Texas. The game consists of 12 different levels in which you are given different tasks like crash with vultures, airplanes and hot air balloons; land on an oil derrick or on the bed of a moving pick-up truck. Up to four players can play on a single handset and extreme stunts are stored in a scrap book to make you remember the vacation fun.
Asteroids
One of the early PC games has been revived again. In DOS, it was available in black and white, but Sony Ericsson has colored the rocks and your plane. The basic theme is still the same i.e. “Destroy the rocks before they destroy you”.
Lumines Block Challenge
It is a puzzle game which requires you to clear the blocks by arranging the two-color shapes falling down the screen into solid color squares. Always watch for the blocks, if they stack up dangerously high, you won’t have much room to move things around, and the game will be over soon.
Overall, Playing Games like Jockey, and Bass fishing was real fun using advanced motion sensor technology. Using motion sensor technology, during the game play the phone easily duplicates the actions by the user, whether you are moving left or right on horse’s back or casting fish lines in the water. Sony Ericsson has provided users with dedicated gaming keys and stereo speakers which really enhance the overall gaming experience on F305. By adding a 2 inches screen onto this slider phone, Sony Ericsson takes playing games on mobile to a new level. Games like Sims2 takes a lot of your time in playing, although this handset offer 8 hours of Talktime but still it was a worry for us but people at Sony Ericsson seeing the need for extra backup has provided a new Power Pack CPP-100 battery. Just attach it to your Key-ring and when battery critical level reaches, simply plug it into the mobile phone to revive an instant battery power boost.
PlayNow
It is one of the main features of SonyEricsson; using it you can directly download songs, games, ringtones and wallpapers. We tried to download some songs but as PlayNow feature is not available in Pakistan, so this offer was not availed.
Web Browsing
Text and image quality was superb, when browsing the internet using F305. For viewing images and text in large format, zooming is made available with this phone, as it has small 2 inch screen and the whole website cannot be viewed properly without zooming. A user can view a website in portrait format but image viewing in landscape format is not available. Sony Ericsson has not really utilized the accelerometer for web browsing and has only limited it for games, if they would have integrated accelerometer with web viewing, than it would be nice. Overall, its web browsing speed is superb and the way it gives information about the number of bytes you have accessed while visiting a page is superb.
Multimedia
Sony Ericsson F305 media player supports all major audio/video compression codecs. Built-in memory of the phone is only limited to 10MB, which was a disappointment for us but Sony Ericsson has given an M2 card socket so that you can expand you phone memory to 4GB. You can transfer music via a USB connection. The phone features that you can stream your music directly to a wireless stereo headset using phone’s Bluetooth A2DP profile. You can listen to your favorite FM radio with the built-in FM radio. TrackID recognizes the music recorded by you and sends you information via internet about the artist, track and release, but this feature was not available in our region.
Using this phone you can talk to your loved ones using hands free, or speaker phone or standard mode. Overall, this phone performed well in all three modes and the reception was superb.
The hands free headset provided with this phone are not easily adjusted in everyone’s ears but using third party’s manufactured headphones, we really enjoyed playing games and listening to music was an outstanding experience.
Connectivity
Sony Ericsson F305 supports GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 2G networks. It does not support WLAN but has given you USB connectivity so that you can connect to you system and transfer day to and fro from you device. Blue Tooth is also available as a standard option in this phone.
Conclusion
In this time of recession when everyone is in search of phones that offers performance and comes at a fair cost, Sony Ericsson has definitely answered the question by introducing F305 handset. It offers all the latest mobile handset features that a user wants in a device. Especially the motion Gaming feature, it is not only interesting to play motion games but an exercise for the people who are less mobile or don’t like to play physical games. Sony Ericsson has done the same in motion playing in mobile handset like Nintendo has done in Gaming consoles. Unlike Nintendo Instead of taking the heavy gaming console, you have to keep it in a pocket. F305 is an all time entertainment for home offices, and on the move. Sony Ericsson has not used its accelerometer in applications other than gaming, if they would have used it in picture and video viewing than this phone would have been more fun. Overall, it is a phone for active people, and who can be more active than youth!
