Sony Ericsson G705 review: Slide-o-matic

Thumbs up for the Media Center

Sony Ericsson G705 runs the flash-based Media Center, where you can find the Music Player 3.0 - a slightly abridged edition of Walkman player 3.0. Across the Media Center menus, you can enjoy screen auto-rotation. The player supports numerous file formats, including MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC +, WAV, WMA, M4A and MIDI plus the MegaBass equalizer preset and Stereo widening.

The player can naturally be set to run in the background. Sound is rich and crisp - as long you're using the player with a good headset, that is. If you are not willing to use the media player step-by-step structure, you can directly play a track through the file manager with its classic flat tree structure.

The interface colors of the Media center vary across different themes.

The music player interface and mega bass preset

Music library in the media center

The video player in the media center supports fast-forwarding and rewinding, while the interface is simple and stylish. The video files are accessible via the file manager too. Fullscreen mode and screenshot capability are some other extras at hand. You can save a frame of video and add it to the gallery.

Video player and display modes

The Media center menu lists the Photo, Music, Video, YouTube, Games, RSS feeds and Settings icons. The settings menu is simple - you may opt for portrait, landscape or auto-rotate modes.

The Photo gallery stores the shots you've taken and prebundled or uploaded images, and offers some extra options like mark as favorite and photo feed. Latest Photo provides quick access to most recent photos. Camera Album is a thumb list for each month of the year. When a month is open, it reveals a 3 x 4 grid of photo thumbs. Scrolling down shows all the photos taken in the corresponding month. The highlighted photo is a bit larger for better viewing.

The Pictures section opens again as a 3 x 4 grid of thumbs with non-camera images, such as the preinstalled wallpapers. When exiting the full screen view of a picture, it smoothly zooms out to thumb view.

The dedicated Photo viewer

Generally, the Photo gallery is a powerful tool for conveniently managing a vast collection of camera photos with great customization capabilities. Photo Tags displays previously marked favorite photos. The Up key on the D-pad offers quick access to sending options like: send as Picture Msg, as email, to blog, via Bluetooth.

Other than that, you can set a photo as wallpaper, screen saver, startup screen, and contact picture straight from the gallery. The well known Pan and Zoom and slideshow feature are also on board. Finally, the G705 is capable of putting standard GPS coordinates in images thanks to its built-in GPS.

The landscape and portrait modes

Accordingly, picture browsing via the classic file manager is still possible, but kind of pushed aside with the timeline view missing. We actually doubt it this timeline feature will be available in future phones, as the trend is integrating Walkman and Cyber-shot features across the Sony Ericsson portfolio.

Picture browsing in the file manager

PhotoDJ, VideoDJ and MusicDJ are signature features for all Sony Ericsson phones, and are available here too.

You can zoom in to the actual size of the picture or even beyond, yet extreme zoom in won't really do any good. Browsing full-res images didn't involve any lags at all, while zooming does take its time. The magnified section of the image loads in low quality, to only appear in full res after a couple of seconds.

Zooming in on a photo

FM radio interface

TrackID is accessible through its original location in the entertainment menu. The service itself has seen several changes to include features like "Find similar music", "Send music info via SMS", "TrackID charts" and a very extensive "Artist info" section.

The TrackID service has seen several updates