What’s up fellow tech kids? It’s Jon Rettinger from TechnoBuffalo here with a review for you of the Sony Ericsson W518a feature phone for AT&T wireless.
This sucker is going to run you $49.99 after a $50.00 mail-in rebate and into your contract. As I mentioned in the unboxing, I don’t generally do that many feature phone reviews. But this one actually I got by a popular request. Let’s go ahead and get started. Before we get into the features, it's the phone and it's got to make good phone calls. And it actually does that quite well—advantage of AT&T’s 3G HSDPA network and taking advantage of it actually quite well. Phone calls were clear. People on the other end of the call heard no way, no it didn’t sounded nice and crystal clear on my end so—the Sony Ericsson for putting a nice radio in the phone.
Let’s go ahead and talk about some of the features of this thing. It’s got a pretty slim design as you guys can see and it’s got three buttons on the front and an external display. Let me show with the external display it does. You go ahead and open up the phone. See it closer, you get the time, your signal strength if you have any new messages, battery and even what network you're on. The H signals HSDPA. These three buttons here obviously take and manage of the Walkman features into the Sony Ericsson phone. If I go ahead and hold down Play for example, they are touch-sensitive buttons by the way as well. It will start to play a song. And actually, it’s got a really loud speaker as well. We’re going to stop that before I get into any sort of music violation but it does function as I advertise. You can scroll from the next song to left and right and it could be actually that quite easily.
And this thing will play mp3 WMA, AAC, AAC+ and EAAC as long as they’re not copy written or they don’t have any source of in correction on them. Well, you can download the software iTunes for example and you get with DDRM. It's not going to play but if it’s just a standard mp3, we’ll have no problem playing them. So—nice things about these two, it’s got a 3.2 mega-pixel camera. It’s actually does a quite nice job. It takes some really stellar picture. It’s not your standard kind of features you’d expect. It’s got HSDPA like I mentioned. It has assisted GPS, meaning it will use the cell network and its internal GPS—to get your good location so you can take advantage of navigation software on the phone. It really does a lot of thing and does a lot of things quite well. So, I’m—the internet as you guys know then it does have a web browser although it’s a little big gimp because it is just a feature phone.
And I see it’s just a feature phone. If you are looking for just a standard telephone that you can send a few text, you can answer calls and you can make calls. You know, this is pretty descent option. I will show you what this web browser looks like. Go ahead and hit this button right here. And those, it’s got Facebook. I’ll talk about that in just a moment and we’ll go to medi and it connects using the mobile network. And you get that sort of option. This is claimed to be an HTM capable browser. In my experience, it wasn’t quite the HTML capable but it definitely did work. So, you can scroll kind of using your finger and get a sort of mouse like cursor. It’s a really—browser but it’s also very functional, if you want to check some scores of a game, you want to check some stocks, you want to do some simple web casts, this is actually going to work out quite well for you.
So, one of the big things about this is actually AT&T is launching a Facebook app on their phone. They can actually launch again using that same Quick Launch button right below the Send key. And you saw it right there on the running apps. This actually will run that—applications. So, we’ll go ahead and open up Facebook. And you see we got a simple login screen. You get a relatively nice Facebook application. I’m not going to show you guys here because that have to go through my whole profile—but taking my word for it, the Facebook application does work quite well.
The buttons on the phone are a little bit different. They kind of got these circles which I thought I wasn’t going to like but you would actually get used to. The circles around them actually make sure you’re not pressing the wrong one. And there’s a pretty descent amount of space between them. I found the keys are actually relatively easy to type in. Texting was fine. It was a standard texting experience using T9 or multi-tap on a—preset nine key keyboard but it worked and it does kind of what it expected to do.
So, if I have to rank this phone on a one to five, I’ll give it a really solid four. It works well. It works as advertised. I wish it had a few more smartphone features like a better calendar system. If possibly some more alerting options but it does work very well. And if you’re looking for just a feature phone that will make phone calls, this is quite a descent way to go.
So, the last thing I want to mention guys is something called AT&T Share and I want to give you a full disclosure. This is something that AT&T, when I sent this device to review, it actually asked me to mention. So, to be nice, I'm going to mention it to you guys as well. And actually this is kind of quite neat. It’s AT&T Shares Facebook application. And essentially what that does is it lets you kind of use AT&T’s Facebook application I just showed you and it kind of lets you earn points. You’d become a fan of AT&T freedom of choice on Facebook. If you haven’t already, I’ll put a link to it in the side bar. Essentially, you’re going to create document and you share your unique AT&T mobile phone experience for others and you can make points and you earn these points and you can use them for tickets to concerts and all kinds of other stuff. It actually is a pretty neat program. I wanted to let you guys know about it.
Again, full disclosure or something that AT&T asks me to mention. So guys, that was it, just a relatively short review here. Hope you enjoyed. For exclusive content, be sure to check me out on Twitter at twitter.com/jon4lakers. To learn more about Techno Buffalo, check out technobuffalo.com or twitter.com/technobuffalo. See you guys in the next video.Bye-bye.
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