Sony Ericsson G705 review: Slide-o-matic

Phonebook good to go

The Sony Ericsson G705 phonebook does not surprise with new features but all the good old stuff is at hand. As with all the latest Sony Ericsson phones, the G705 stores up to 1000 entries with a total of 7000 phone number fields.

Contacts can be ordered by First or Last name. They are searched by gradual typing of the desired name.

You can choose whether the SIM contacts or the phone contacts should be displayed by default. Unfortunately, displaying both lists simultaneously is not an option.

The phonebook lets you auto save to SIM card any new contacts that you're adding to the phone memory.

Sony Ericsson G705 has an ample and elaborate phonebook

When adding a new contact, the available details are distributed over five available tabs. The first is where you put the name and the numbers, the second holds email and web addresses. The third is for assigning a picture, custom ringtone, custom message tone and a voice command. The fourth goes for postal details. The last, fifth tab, is for making an additional note and adding a birth date.

When you enter a birthday, Sony Ericsson G705 prompts adding it to the calendar and setting a reminder, which we think, is a handy feature.

Editing contacts in tabs on G705

Telephony

G705 is handling calls trouble-free, no voice quality or reception issues. Earpiece sound is relatively loud and crisp. The integrated loudspeaker cannot compete with the rich, melodic and balanced sound of the C905, so listening to music on the speaker is not much of a treat.

Here is how the Sony Ericsson G705 stacks up against some of the other handsets we've measured in our speakerphone loudness test. More info on our test, and all results so far, are stocked here.

The Call log keeps track of your recent communications. It is partitioned into four different tabs. They are: All, Answered (Received), Dialed and Missed. When there are several calls made to a single contact, only the last one gets recorded.

Finally, Smart Search completes the telephony features. It automatically looks up all the contacts whose numbers contain the digits you type on the stand-by screen. In addition, it also lists the names that start with the letters corresponding to the digits.

Smart search we do like

Reliable messaging

Along with the standard messaging functionality, Sony Ericsson G705 offers the proprietary Manage Messages feature, plenty of settings for accounts, and the option to assign categories to messages. The Manage Messages application enhances message handling. Messages can be moved to memory card or phone memory, arranged by categories, date, size, and contact.

The messaging department

Sony Ericsson G705 handles all common types of messages, all of which - save for emails - share a common inbox. When composing a message, a warning is displayed when you exceed the 160-character limit, to let you know that the message will be divided in two (or more if necessary) parts for sending.

There is also a rich T9 dictionary. The SMS and MMS messages share an editor; when typing SMS you could easily convert it into an MMS via the options menu or using the attach-stuff toolbar below the text box to insert images, animations, videos or sounds.

Composing SMS and converting into MMS

You can opt to sort messages by category, provided you defined a specific category for each message. Six of them come preinstalled: Business, Favorites, Follow Up, Fun, Holiday, Important, but categories are fully customizable as well.

If sorted by category, a big Inbox By Category tag appears instead of the standard small Inbox icon. Under it, the categories are displayed but only the ones that contain messages are shown, which is convenient. You can also delete all messages in a given category.

A drawback is that in the general inbox there is no indication if a message has been assigned a category. There's no indication in messages that are already open either. The Manage Messages feature, along with Categories, offers wide-ranging customization options and improved message handling.

Categories offer good sorting options

The phone also supports push email to boost mobile email usability. Emails are delivered in the background (similar to SMS or MMS).

The email client in G705 supports dozens of settings and all types of encodings, just like some of the most advanced messaging devices out there. The phone can save attachments, no matter if they are supported or unknown file formats. Email messages can be sorted by size, date and time.

Unfortunately the phone is unable to handle any documents that are attached to emails (such as .xls, .doc, or .pdf files for example) due to the lack of a document reader. So the options are limited to plain text only and you should have that in mind if you're going for the G705.