Sony Ericsson C510 Cyber-shot

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The C510 is not exactly the martini-sipping, lady-loving 007 of the Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot range, but it's a solid 006. While it's not particularly flashy, you could take it to the ambassador's party without being embarrassed, and it's got your back when you need it, with a good range of features. It's Sony Ericsson's first phone with face-detection technology, but the C510 isn't about innovation. The C510 is a good all-round camera-phone that aims to bring Cyber-shot picture quality to the masses.

Editors' note:

This review is based on tests done by our sister site CNET.co.uk. As such, please note that there may be slight differences in the testing procedure and ratings system. For more information on the actual tests conducted on the product, please inquire directly at the site where the article was originally published. References made to some other products or telcos in this review may not be available or applicable in Asia.

Design

The C510 looks stylish, especially in black, with smart blue accents, a good mix of matte and brushed surfaces, and a bright, clear QVGA 320 x 240-pixel screen. It's thin, at 12.5 mm, but feels solid and well-made.

The C510 is comfortable to hold when used as a phone, and big enough to get your hand around when taking photos. The buttons are small, though, especially the feature buttons, which are grouped tightly together. Hitting the dial or end-call buttons accurately could prove a challenge for stubby-fingered users.

Features

The C510 is principally a camera-phone. But it's a basic one, and the features reflect that. It's got a 3.2-megapixel camera, which peeps out elegantly from behind a slider with a solid mechanism that won't open in your pocket.

The camera interface is easy to use. The menu and shortcut keys make switching settings trouble-free. It's also simple to switch from video to still photos with the navigation key.

In fact, we were impressed with the C510's user interface throughout. Features were clearly labelled and we were never left guessing as to what a selection would do. Messages were in plain English and perfectly comprehensible, even for non-geeks. For example, when we tried to send an empty text message, the C510 warned us and gave the following options: "Continue writing", "don't send" and "send anyway".

Unfortunately, the user interface of the PC-syncing software isn't anyway near as easy to use. The phone synchronises easily and quickly, but the media manager is horrendous, as is the case with most manufacturers' applications. It supports drag and drop, but its greyish interface is vague and it's unclear what media-file types it supports. Our attempt to load WAV files failed, but we received no message to let us know why. The C510 supports transferring multimedia files with other applications, however.

The C510 isn't a smartphone by any stretch of the imagination, but Sony Ericsson has packed in a good selection of features. Although it doesn't have GPS, it comes with Google Maps installed, and uses nearby mobile-phone masts to triangulate your position. We found it to be accurate enough--within a couple of streets, at least in central London.

The C510 also uses this location for the camera's geotagging feature, so you can put your photos on Flickr and view them on a map of where they were taken, for example.

Another appealing feature is the accelerometer. You can rotate your photos, videos and Web pages between portrait and landscape mode by turning the phone.

Surfing with the C510's browser is painless, and the Web-feeds feature is slick. It made it easy for us to grab the CNET UK RSS feed and podcast from the Web site, and the ticker feature displayed new items gracefully on the homepage as they came in. Feeds can be set to update automatically or manually, to avoid data charges.

With its good podcast capability and its FM radio, the C510 is a handy entertainment device, and its media player pumps out good sound quality. It also has YouTube built in--although clips look rough. We compared standard-definition clips on the handset to those on a PC, and the C510 exhibited a terrible case of the jaggies. Nevertheless, along with some good-looking 3D games with motion sensors, these features mean we'd be happy to be stuck on a train with the C510.

But it's criminal that Sony Ericsson chose not to include a standard headphone jack or an adapter. There's no way to use your own headphones with this handset, and we found that the included headphones are flimsy, with poor sound reproduction.

Tags: Feature, Camera, entertainment, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, video

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