Following our recent reviews of some mid range and lower range phones, we’ve decided to look at the Sony Ericsson Live, which comes with a 1GHz processor, Android 2.3 and a 720p camera and is available for under £10 on some contracts.
Sony has really been pushing this phones as one of its Walkman type phones, though Sony’s Walkman brand hasn’t really been of much importance since the day of the CD Player and essentially the day of the portable tape cassette. Interestingly the Sony Ericsson Live isn’t nearly the strongest of MP3 phones – even in Sony’s stable.
Sony has teamed the Sony Ericsson Live up with a 2GB memory via an SD card, which isn’t enough for more than a few albums, though cheap, it doesn’t show up too many similarly priced Android phones.
Physically it is a very compact phone and one that is certainly attractive – taking its style tweaks from the modern Xperia styled phones and comes with a decent Operating System package with Android 2.3 – making it ideal for people not heavily multimedia reliant.
Sony has added the Timescape 4.0 user interface to the phone, which is innovative, improves on controversial problems with previous versions and is an attractive user interface that makes good use of its smart corners for app short cuts. This Smart Corners facility allows you to dock apps in the corner, for access on any of the five screens you can choose to be on.
Timescape itself is Sony’s attempt at managing social media data concisely on one screen and it does look nice on its stack of scrolling cards. It also introduces a nice xLOUD feature to boost music and notifications on the phone, though with poor earphones it can distort sound as the headphones won’t have strong enough drivers.
The Walkman feature no longer carries much weight and the Sony Ericsson Live does offer a couple of nice features in this area and allows you to link to Wikipedia entries from songs and has some other nice tweaks, however it is nothing special and just seems to be an exercise in branding on many levels.
Sony has included 1Ghz of processing power and 512mb of RAM and altogether this is good for simple tasks, and quite okay for the price of the phone. It’s a decent browsing device, once you don’t mind the small but okay 3.2inch screen which has a resolution of 320x480p.
It can be a little limited on text heavy sites and isn’t the greatest to watch video on, however it’s not the worst screen on a phone by any means and considering the price is quite okay.
The phone’s camera is a 5mp one, with a number of nice little software options, such as panoramic shots, geo tagging and also allows 3D shooting for playback on an aptly powered Sony 3D TV. The 720p camera isn’t out of this world, but utilitarian and good for the phone.
Overall the Sony Ericsson Live is a branding exercise gone wrong and doesn’t play music in any way of a more efficient manner than most phones. However, as a phone it’s quite a decent low spec model, with a good processor and some nice touches, as well as some flaws.