Sony Ericsson Yari preview: First look

Sony Ericsson Yari 360-degree spin

Design and construction

Sony Ericsson Yari sports a neat and simple design that will probably seem attractive to more conservative users. However under the unassuming hood lay some pretty extraordinary features that might attract tech-freaks too.

Sony Ericsson Yari at ours

For starters there are two small knobs above the display, which are actually gaming keys. Those are a bit small but putting larger ones there will probably have devastating effect on the phone's design. Between the keys in question are the light sensor, the secondary camera and the earpiece.

The game keys are hardly our favorites

Below them is the 2.4" 262K color display which has pretty good picture quality although we have seen Sony Ericsson do better on several occasions.

The display is good, it's just that we are used to greats from Sony Ericsson

Under the display, an ample D-pad is sided by six controls. Each is topped by a thin soft key, followed by pretty large Call (left) and End key (right).

There's a bunch of controls bellow it

The bottom knobs are Shortcuts on the left and Clear key on the right. The styling of the navigation pad is quite elegant and the controls are adequately usable even though larger-handed people might have some issues getting used to the soft keys.

The D-pad up direction also acts as a shortcut to the music player when on the homescreen, hence the music player icon on top of it. The other sides of the control are also assigned various shortcuts.

Sliding the phone open reveals the decent 12-key alphanumeric keypad. It is utterly flat offering little tangible borders between the different rows or columns. Those that like texting on the go will hardly appreciate the fact that you have to look at most times to avoid typos but in most other cases it does the job.

Not the most spectacular keypad we have ever seen but it still does the job