Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman Review

Introduction:

The Walkman brand has a special place in the heart of every old school music lover, but its fame and glory have long started to fade away. Still, there is a bunch of music-oriented phones made by Sony Ericsson that keep the embers alive, and the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman is exactly one of them. It is a feature phone aimed at youngsters, who are passionate for music, but cannot afford something flashier. However, going over its list of features shows that it offers a fair amount of bang for the buck. But how does it perform in real life? Let’s check it out and see.

Design:

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman feels just like a toy in the hand – cheap and plasticky. Its physical keys do not leave a positive impression either as they are poorly exposed and provide little to no tactile feedback whatsoever. Accidental presses of the lock button are common as well. At least the home key located below the phone’s display is big and easy to find with your thumb.



You can compare the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

With a waistline of 0.56 inches (14.3 millimeters), this isn’t the slimmest phone out there. However, it is tiny enough to fit in almost every pocket. On top of that, the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman is pretty lightweight as it tips the scale at 3.1 ounces (88 grams). However, its dimensions make it difficult for people with large hands to use it comfortably.

Looking at the phone’s 3-inch, scratch-resistant touchscreen display is a pleasure as it delivers precise and saturated colors. The screen boasts a resolution of 240 by 400 pixels, which makes even small text look sharp and easily legible. Besides that, the display shines bright enough to be used comfortably in broad daylight, and its viewing angles are quite impressive.

Disappointment strikes, however, once you start navigating around. Even though it is of the capacitive type, the display lacks sensitivity and needs to have your finger firmly against it in order to function properly. That makes even the most basic of tasks such as typing text or scrolling about rather tricky to perform.

All in all, The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman is a cheap, tiny slab of plastic with a beautiful, yet misbehaving display. Let’s move along and see what the handset has to offer in terms of functionality.

Interface and Functionality:

It may be just a humble feature phone, but the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman does offer some flexibility when it comes to personalization. The phone runs the Touch UI, which is reminiscent of the UX interface found on its smart siblings. In particular, we liked the ability to customize the four corners of the home screen with a shortcut of our choice.


Unfortunately, surfing the web is not something that the phone's built-in browser excels at. It struggles with displaying large web pages and refuses to render most of the images they may contain. However, we installed Opera Mini 6.1 and it worked nicely. Sure, the pages loaded somewhat slowly even though we were using the phone's Wi-Fi radio instead of its EDGE connectivity, but eventually, they looked properly aligned and scrolling was smooth enough.


The eBuddy client, which comes pre-installed, grabbed our attention as it enables you to use multiple instant messaging platforms simultaneously, namely MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, Google Talk, MySpace Messenger, ICQ, Facebook Chat and Hyves. A dedicated email app is also on board. Sadly, the on-screen keyboard that the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman packs is really uncomfortable to use. Having no QWERTY keyboard is a punishment and the unresponsive display makes inputting text even more difficult.




Camera:

The  Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman offers a basic 3.2-megapixel camera with no flash or autofocus. With specs like that it is no surprising that it takes poor photos. Even when taken on a bright, sunny day, images lack detail and the dynamics range is below average. Things get even worse when shooting at night as photos are full of digital noise. The videos are unusable at QVGA resolution at 15 frames per second.



Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman Sample Video:



Multimedia:

Finally, let’s see whether the phone has what it takes to justify its Walkman brand. Just like the case is with all handsets from the lineup, a dedicated Walkman button conveniently takes you straight to the phone’s music player. The experience would not be complete without the built-in stereo loudspeakers and the premium set of earphones that comes included in the set. What is strangely missing, however, is a microSD card in the box, which is a drag as all that the phone has is the miniscule 111 megabytes of user-available storage.

Both the built-in speakers and the earphones produce clear and rich sound even at the highest volume levels. What is a bit disappointing, though, is that the volume doesn’t seem to go high enough. Another irritating thing that we noticed is that there is a slight amount of hiss during the quiet parts of a song and annoying clicking sounds are audible when tracks change, but these are both problems that few users would probably pay attention to. Still, this is a music-centric phone and such imperfections could have been avoided.

When it comes to features, the Walkman music player has all the basics covered. However, there are a few bells and whistles that are meant to enhance the experience further. The karaoke mode, for example, suppresses the vocals of the song that is currently playing. Sadly, the effect vary drastically from song to song, so it may be unusable in many cases. Another feature that Sony Ericsson decided to put is the Zappin functionality, which lets you preview a song by jumping straight to its chorus. Unfortunately, it simply doesn’t work as intended. Besides that, using it regularly seems quite pointless to us. Last but not least, the TrackID app has the cool ability to recognize songs by simply recording a fraction of it and submitting it online for analysis. We tested  it out ourselves and sure enough, it works like a charm.


Overall, the audio experience that the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman delivers is not spectacular, but it is pretty good considering the device’s price point. Most importantly, the sound quality is above average and the Walkman music player handles well its primary functions.

Watching videos on the Mix Walkman is possible thanks to its support for both the QuickTime and 3GP formats. However, we couldn't get anything sized beyond 320 by 240 pixels to play. The handset also offers a YouTube player, but although it gets the job done for the most part, videos sometimes refuse to play and an error message pops up. Nevertheless, tapping back and then hitting the video link again solves the problem.

Performance:

When testing out the in-call audio quality of the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman we noticed that the earpiece is sufficiently loud, yet voices sound slightly muffled. On the other side of the line, our voice was accompanied by a fair amount of crackling sounds and background noises. Nevertheless, we think that this average in-call performance is not a deal breaker.

The handset comes with a 1000mAh battery, which should be good for 9 hours and 30 minutes of talk time or 465 hours in stand-by mode. Both of these are impressive figures well above the average. Unfortunately, the Mix Walkman is capable of playing music for only 13 hours on a single charge, and although that should be enough to last you through the day, even older Walkman phones can go beyond that milestone.

Conclusion:

Overall, the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman has more than a few drawbacks, but its low price makes up for most of them. Currently, the phone can be found for about $120 off contract, which makes it a bargain considering the features that it packs. We were impressed with its beautiful display and the Wi-Fi connectivity is a significant bonus that will definitely come in handy. Most importantly, it handles its primary purpose of being a music-oriented device fairly well.

The only thing that we have a hard time overcoming is its unresponsive touchscreen, which is tricky to use and makes typing a cumbersome process, especially with the lack of a QWERTY on-screen keyboard. The poorly exposed hardware buttons should also be taken into account.

However, if you are looking for an affordable phone that can double as a portable music player, the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman would be a good choice. Of course, there are a few other handsets that we consider a worthy alternative, such as the even cheaper Nokia X2, which is also packed with features to satisfy music lovers. The evenly powered LG Cookie Plus also deserves some attention, and even though it lacks Wi-Fi connectivity, it makes up for it with its 3G radio. The Sony Ericsson Elm also falls into the same price range and has a lot to offer for its money. There is even a smartphone that you can grab for the same amount of cash – The Android-powered Huawei U8150 IDEOS.

Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman Video Review: