Looks and Functionality, what more can you want? (Sony CMD-J5)

Member Name: thanatoszane

Product:	Sony CMD-J5
Date:	28/07/02 (524 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good looking, Feature packed, Good looking

Disadvantages: Strange crashes, Wierd spelling, You can't date it :-)

My last phone was a Motorola clam-shell style one designed for texting and the web. It had a keyboard, and the WAP feature was great, but you couldn't use it for a phones normal purpose, talking, without a hands-free free kit.

The hands free connector on my phone was dodgy, and to get it fixed would cost more than buying a new phone. Since people were becoming rather irritated with not being able to use my mobile to talk to me, and you couldn't top up the credit without making a phone call, I decided it was time to get a new phone.

My (now ex) boyfriend had a Sony CMD-J5. This phone is GORGEOUS. It reminds me a lot in style of the Sony Clie hand held - sleek, silver, with a purple trim round the display. After seeing his, I fell in love and just HAD to have one - he joked I loved his phone more than him, and I guess he was right :-p

I bought mine on contract from BT Cellnet - they were pushing one of the newer Sony phones and desperate to get rid of this one, so they basically gave it to me for free on the condition that I took out one of the higher priced contracts. I was perfectly happy to do this, since I text an awful lot and use my phone for work too.

The display is slightly larger than on most phones and of a higher resolution. The buttons are smaller than on most phones, more spaced out and much nicer to the touch. They have a nice click, but it isn't as loud as the click on a Nokia, so you don't irritate people when you type text messages

The aerial sticks out, but it's sturdy so I don't worry about it breaking off.

The phone, like most Sony products, has a scroll wheel. This is located on the left hand side, and is very nice to use once you get used to it.

The keypad lock is a small dual purpose slider also on the left - you push the slider up to change between silent, ring once, ring, and vibrate (albeit a slightly soft vibrate), and push it down to lock the key
pad. Pushing up again unlocks it.

The speakers and mic on the phone are very good quality - they are quite loud and you can actually *use* the hands-free feature, rather than attempt to use it and find the person you're calling can't hear a thing :-)

The build quality is very good - I've dropped my unit so many times in the four months I've had it, and other than one small scratch on the screen from it getting dropped on a sharp metal spike at work, it looks almost new.

Battery life wise, when you first get it you'll find that it needs charging frequently, but after the first couple of weeks the batteries start to last longer. One warning though - when the battery is getting low you'll find that the phone does strange things, such as ring when there's no-one calling you, and come up with lots of 'Unspecified Error's and the occasional 'Unhandled Exception'

The CMD-J5, you see, is quite a nice phone software wise - it has WAP support, and basic support for normal HTML web pages. It uses Microsoft Mobile Explorer for this. The software, being Microsoft, is quite slow and clunky, but it's capable of quite a lot.

It also has support for POP3 email as well as webmail over WAP, and comes with a calculator, clock supporting world time, scheduler and a phone book complete with categories plus the ability to add notes to peoples names.

You can record your own ring tones, and assign different tones to different phone book categories. You only get a few seconds worth of record time per ring tone tough. Another nice feature is that you can send picture attachments to people with Sony phones. The picture choices are limited, but they do jazz up messages a bit.

The games choices aren't that great - unlike Nokia there?s no snake :-( you do get a 'safe cracking' style number game though, and something similar to Gorillas from the QBasic / DOS days. There
's a 'sand art' game too, but that seems pretty pointless.

After using a phone with a keyboard I thought that texting would be a nightmare. The pre-emptive spelling on this phone makes it a bit quicker, but I still find it annoying - it spells my name 'Lesley' as 'jerkez' (any idea what that means anyone') and calls my favourite online game, Avalon 'cuckoo'. It also changes ''puter' to 'studs', 'bus' to 'cup' and has managed to find a few strange perversions on other words that make innocent text messages sound like I want to perform perverse acts upon peoples donkeys!

This phone does have it's foibles - sometimes it does loose signal for no apparent reason, it takes a while to come on, because the software is so slow, and it can crash in strange ways, but it's so well built, good looking and feature packed that I will forgive it the occasional trouble.

It the perfect shape and size for my hand, I can scroll easily through menus with the scroll wheel, and type whole emails / text messages with lighting speed.

It looks stylish, is very light, and of such high build quality that I'm proud to own it.

It's an older phone now, but if you can find it on sale it's well worth getting - it was ahead of its time when it was released and it still holds its own feature wise and looks wise against most mid range phones on the market today.

Summary: