Communications Technology

The Motorola VE538 is a lightweight candybar cell phone. It’s one of the most compact phones we’ve seen recently, and the small size and rounded shape mean it fits comfortably in your hand. Despite how compact and light it is, the VE538 feels reasonably built and the etched circular pattern on the rear battery cover makes the phone easy to grip.

The layout of the Motorola VE538 is fairly straightforward. It has a rather large screen considering the size of the phone, a five-way navigational pad and a raised keypad. There are no buttons on the sides or top of the handset, with the VE538 lacking volume control keys. The keypad stretches from edge to edge of the front fascia and provides good tactility, making long messages easy to type. The five-way navigational pad is comfortable for most part, though the directional keys are a little small.

Using the Motorola VE538 is a pleasant experience, thanks to a snappy and well-designed user interface. The main menu isn’t as visually appealing as many other mobile phones, but there is no lag and the design makes it easy to navigate. There is also no keystroke lag when text messaging and Motorola has refreshingly opted for the T9 predictive text input system, instead of its regular iTap system.

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SAN FRANCISCO–Even as Blu-ray Disc and Blu-ray player sales are growing, Sony is looking to build out its larger strategy surrounding the company’s high-definition disc products.

At a small press event here Thursday, the company introduced a new feature of BD-Live and a new piece of Blu-ray hardware.

MovieIQ will be included on some high-profile releases from Sony starting in September. It’s essentially IMDb live–while a movie is playing, facts about casting, directors, production, and actors’ filmographies pop up onscreen. It’s powered not by IMDb, but by Gracenote, creators of CDDB, which Sony purchased just over a year ago.

It’s the kind of feature intended to keep people from pausing a movie and hopping online to ask questions like, “I totally recognize that actress, but from what movie?” It’s also meant to build on the inherent capability of Blu-ray players that have Internet access. Sony has tried to do this by allowing BD-Live access to exclusive trailers and some trivia games, but MovieIQ seems like something that users would engage with repeatedly, not something they’d just use once and forget about.

A senior Sony exec at the event, Tracy Garvey, called MovieIQ the “first killer-app for BD-Live.” That sounded like an admission that none of the BD-Live features thus far have been all that compelling.

It’s clear Sony is still in the process of fine-tuning its BD-Live strategy. At the event, Sony Vice President Rich Marty said that while 37 million Blu-ray Discs were sold in 2008, the company has only released about 100 titles that are BD-Live enabled. In other words they still have a long way to go.

“BD-Live is complementary to Blu-ray,” he said Thursday. “It was never meant to compete with the Web, it’s not a VOD (video on demand) play. We’re still building the foundation.”

Part of building that foundation is bringing down the cost of Blu-ray players. While the PlayStation 3 is still generally regarded as the best deal on a Blu-ray player from a top-tier electronics company, other brands sell players for as low as $99 or $199 these days. But Sony is also pushing Blu-ray drives in notebooks. While Dell, Sony, Acer, and Asus have dutifully jumped in offering the drives, Sony says the prices are still too high.

So Thursday, the company introduced its Vaio NW series notebook, which starts at $879 with Blu-ray inside, but is $799 without it. It’s considered a budget notebook for Sony–it’s not the cheapest Blu-ray-enabled notebook out there, but it is for Sony. Some features of the NW Series include a 15.4-inch screen, an HDMI port, and a quick-start Splashtop button for booting directly to the Web if the computer is turned off. It will go on sale later this month.

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The Sony Ericsson F305 mobile phone sports an attractive white design and is well-built. An eight-way control pad sits on the front of the slider, and there is a proprietary headphone/charging port on the left side. The 2-megapixel (Mp) camera sits on the back of the handset above the battery, and a Memory Stick Micro (M2) card slot can be found on the top.

One of the key features being spruiked by the Boost Mobile is the Sony Ericsson F305’s “Wiistyle gaming experience”. The Sims 2 and Need for Speed: Prostreet are just two of the Java-based games that are included, and both are easy to control with the “gaming pad” control wheel. The 512MB M2 card that comes bundled with the Sony Ericsson F305 includes 50 extra games.

Unfortunately the “motion sensing” of the Sony Ericsson F305 mobile phone isn’t very effective, and we found it unable to detect anything but the most violent movements. Bowling and Basshunter are just two of the motion-intensive games included, and we found that varying the level of handset shaking did little to improve or lower our scores.

The number keys are small and have very little bounce-back. This means that you often don’t know if you’ve properly hit a key. The numbers on the top row (1, 2 and 3) are the firmest and most troublesome.

The signal quality of the FM tuner is good, and the phone’s ability to recognise songs being played on the radio (using TrackID) is a definite plus. By recording a segment of music and uploading it to the TrackID service, you can find out the name of the song and other details. The service is free to use, but data costs still apply.

Call quality is good considering the phone’s price tag. Volume levels are fine and we didn’t notice any excessive static during our testing.
According to Sony Ericsson, the F305 mobile phone has an estimated talk time of 480min and a standby time of 700 hours.

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