Sony Ericsson Spiro Review

Introduction:

Some things will never change. Phone manufacturers come and go, flagship models make a short appearance and then fall into oblivion, but it seems like Sony Ericsson's Walkman series is here to stay. Or at least it seems to be this way, as the company has recently unleashed a brand new offering for its music lineup, namely the Sony Ericsson Spiro. Now, the Spiro may be small in size, and not that impressive in terms of specs, but it's a descendant of a once glorious family of phones, at the heart of which lies a powerful driving force - music.



Design:

Design-wise, the Sony Ericsson Spiro is a simple slider, with a compact body that will easily fit pockets of any size. It is made from a relatively cheap-feeling plastic that does not allow for a very firm grip. Nevertheless, the Spiro doesn't feel flimsy in your hand.



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

The 2.2-inch display that the Sony Ericsson Spiro uses is of average quality. It presents some nice and vivid colors, but its viewing angles have some room for improvement. In terms of resolution, 240x320 pixels seem to be just enough to guarantee smooth visualization of text and images on this real estate.

Right below the screen you'll find the very, very small keys of the d-pad, which also houses the music control functions. Also tiny are the soft, send, end, shortcuts and clear keys. That said, we can't help but admit that they are nicely-made. It's just that they're quite small, which can be the cause for accidental presses.


On the left side there's the microUSB port, on the right is the volume rocker, which works okay, and on the top is the standard 3.5mm jack. The back side houses the 2 megapixel camera with no flash or autofocus. Naturally, removing the back cover will give you access to the 1000mAh Li-Polymer battery, microSD and SIM card slots.




We are not perfectly pleased with the Spiro's sliding mechanism. It works reassuringly, but there's some slight sound of plastic friction that's a bit unpleasant. The size of the numpad keys is passable, and the key themselves are executed well, so there's no trouble using them for dialing or SMS writing.

Interface and functionality:

We were not excited to see the same old interface that Sony Ericsson uses for its featurephones, but alas, the deed is done. It's pretty simplistic for the most part, meaning no one will have trouble finding their way around it, with the exception of a few things related to the menu structure. For example, why is the Applications menu placed inside the Organizer one?


Otherwise, the interface is quite snappy, with no hints of slowdown. The Sony Ericsson Spiro sports a standard organizer, identical to the versions running on previous models of the manufacturer, i.e. proper (for a feature phone) calendar, alarms, calculator, etc... nothing coming out of left field here. The Spiro features a very useful Facebook and Twitter applications that have the potential to provide socializers with good amount of options to your each service. You can do status updates, messages, comments, uploading and browsing of pictures, be it your own or belonging to your buddies).


The Sony Ericsson Spiro comes with standard messaging functionality with texts visualizing in threaded style. It´s a good thing the client handles multiple accounts, recognizes major email providers and sets everything up for you automatically. Of course, typing with the keypad cannot compare to a proper QWERTY layout, but is still comfortable and fast enough.



Camera:

To be fair, the Sony Ericsson Spiro's 2MP shooter produces images that are quite poor. Outdoor photos have unrealistic colors and incredibly poor detail, while indoors came out passable, as long as lighting conditions are good.




Video recording is disastrous, with the phone capable of shooting at 176x144 resolution and 15 frames per second, so the end result is neither detailed, nor smooth.

Sony Ericsson Spiro sample video at 176x144 pixels resolution.

Multimedia:

The Media menu hosts all multimedia playback applications. The Photo Gallery allows for browsing of pictures, Facebook albums, your camera album, photo feeds, web albums, etc.

The Walkman music player is Sony Ericsson´s standard application available on other feature phones of the company and delivers a number of filtering options (by artist, album, genre, year, individual tracks). TrackID is also on board, ready to serve its purpose of a music recognition service.


The loudspeaker has a decent power, but of course, for day-to-day listening you'd like to resort to the earphones. Speaking of the earphones, we found the set from the box to be quite satisfying, with good power and balance between across the frequencies. You can always fine-tune the experience by using different equalizer settings, or plugging your favorite earphones instead.

Performance:

Calling quality on the Sony Ericsson Spiro is fine for the most part, as we managed to hear our callers clearly, without much issues. Things on the other end of the line are similar, with our callers saying that we sound fine, but not really impressive.

The Spiro is powered by a 1000mAh Li-Polymer battery, which is said to be capable of providing you with 20 hours of constant music playback.

Conclusion:

At the end of the day, the Sony Ericsson Spiro proved to be an average music slider. The handset did not stand out in any of the categories we tested it, but it also did not fail, except for the camera department, where we found it to be very unpleasing. Still, the Spiro is a decent entry-level phone with a relaxing, compact design and good music capabilities, aided by the 3.5mm headset jack and pretty decent music output quality. Well, the materials in use are by no means ground shaking, but you can't have it all when your choice is a low-end cell phone.

In case the Sony Ericsson Spiro does not live up to your standards, be it for its plasticy feel, or poor image and video capture capabilities, we can recommend that you also take a look at the Sony Ericsson Zylo, which is also of the Walkman family, but is slightly more elaborate in terms of features. Another option is the Nokia X3 – a music slider which manages to carry out similar tasks, but with the flavor of the world's largest cell phone manufacturer.