3GSM Barcelona 2006 live coverage

GSMArena team, 12-16 February 2006.

At the first day of the 3GSM Congress, Sony Ericsson announced their latest additions in phone models. The K610 3G phone and low-end J100.

Sony Ericsson booth

Sony Ericsson K610

The K610 is 102 x 45.2 x 16.9 mm big and weighs 92 grams, thus is one of the smallest 3G bar phones. It has a 262K colors 1.9" TFT display with 176 x 220 pixels resolution. The UMTS/GSM phone also has a 2 megapixel camera, built-in music player, Bluetooth, Memory Stick Micro (M2) slot and USB port.

Sony Ericsson K610

We had the chance to play for a bit with Sony Ericsson K610. The phone is really small for a 3G device and looks and feels great. The dark red menu suits the phone well, but we had trouble to see which is the current selected item. Since the firmware is in beta, there were some things not functioning like they should be, for example the Activity menu.

Main menu - which item is selected?

Adding a new contact

The activity menu has a Running apps tab. Not everything is ok with the early firmware

The player is called Walkman?

We took a picture with the new phone. Please, note that this is beta firmware, the quality will certainly improve in the final version. Moreover, the lighting conditions inside the Sony Ericsson booth were hard even for our DSLR.

Photo taken with Sony Ericsson K610 beta

Sony Ericsson J100

The J100 is aimed for the everyday use and is not very sophisticated in features. It has a 65K colors on its 96 x 64 pixels STN display. Basic options only are included in this device. SMS, polyphonic melodies, vibration alert, alarm clock, calculator.

Sony Ericsson J100

Sony Ericsson W950

On the second day of the Congress, Sony Ericsson presented another mobile phone. The 4GB Walkman, W950 UMTS phone. The new device is 106 x 54 x 15 mm big and weighs 112 g. It runs on Symbian v.91 OS and UIQ 3.0 platform. The 4GB flash memory and the 2.6" QVGA display with 262K colors make the stylish Walkman phone very desirable for music lovers. The W950 supports multiple music file formats like MP3, m4a, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, WAV. The UMTS device also has Bluetooth, Infrared and USB connectivity features.

Sony Ericsson W950 Walkman

Sony Ericsson P990

Sony Ericsson P990

We spent some time with the Sony Ericsson P990. The fully featured phone is almost too big for our taste, but the current P910 users are already used to this size. The phone is fast and responsive. Anyway, the software is not yet ready for the prime time - for example the Video application crashed when we tried to play one of the sample videos installed on the phone.

Sony Ericsson P990 main screen

Call log, main menu, audio player

Video player not rock solid, do you want to debug?

Sony Ericsson M600

Sony Ericsson M600

Sony Ericsson M600 was announced not long ago and is similar to the newly announced W950 model. Both phones have similar form factor and no camera. The M600 has less internal memory and Memory Stick card slot, while W950 relies entirely on the huge 4GB internal memory. The M600 QWERTY keyboard is another difference. We were interested how is the new keyboard and we tried the phone on the Sony Ericsson stand. Each of the keys can be pressed either in the left or right edge and this way the 20 keys can function as a full QWERTY keyboard. It's definitely faster to write this way, instead of the traditional multi press way without T9 enabled. We see this keyboard as an experiment and we are not sure how successful it will be. After all, the phone has virtual onscreen QWERTY keyboard and for most of the users this keyboard will be a faster way to enter text.

Sony Ericsson M600

M600 QWERTY keyboard

Sony Ericsson W810

Sony Ericsson W810

We expect the W810 Walkman model to be a big commercial success for Sony Ericsson (just like K750 and W800) and this is why it was interesting for us to try the new phone. The W810 is a successor of both K750 and W800 models, it gets the color and design from K750 and the Walkman player from W800. The new model is quad-band and has the long expected EDGE connectivity.

Sony Ericsson W810

The user interface of the W810 is not much different from the W800 for example. The new Walkman now has Activity menu, which is common for the new Sony Ericsson models. We were interested in the photo application and we took some test photos with W810. Again, please don't judge the phone too harshly - the firmware of the device is still in beta and the lighting conditions in the Sony Ericsson booth were unfavourable.

Photo samples from Sony Ericsson W810 beta