Sony Ericsson G502 Review

Multimedia:

G502 is equipped with the already standard for the latest Sony Ericsson models, multimedia menu. We were glad to see options here, which not until long ago, were only appropriate to the high class devices of this type. This will definitely be a plus for the audience G502 is intended for or in other words, for the “Internet generation”.

The music player offers options for sorting the tracks by artist, album, or by the user created playlist. You can upload audio books as well. The fact that the weak loudspeaker and the average sound quality can be seen as drawbacks, is understandable, bearing in mind that we are not discussing a multimedia phone.





The TrackID function is accessible from the Entertainment menu and thanks to it, you won’t be wondering who is the artist of the song you are currently listening to. However, there is an RDS FM Radio for when you get tired of the uploaded music.


We were pleasantly surprised to see that G502 easily played 320x240 pixels videos in H.264 format. Despite that the quality of the picture wasn’t great, the player did a good job for a device of this class.




Camera:

The G502’s camera is 2-megapixel without autofocus or flash. The good news is that, it uses the software we know well from the high class of the manufacturer. It starts up quickly (about 3 seconds) and offers quite some options. The left soft button opens the settings menu, where you can select the shooting mode (normal, panoramic, frames, burst), resolution and other options such as night mode, countdown timer, white balance, etc.

The pictures are not top quality and have poor detail, but that is normal for a camera from this class. However, when taking photographs outdoors or in a well-lighted area the colors are real and saturated. Avoid shooting when there is not enough light, because the results will make you cry.



The video camera can record clips in MP4 format with QVGA resolution and 15 fps, which is much better than 3GP, but is far from useful on a computer, due to the low quality.

Sony Ericsson G502 sample video at 320x240 pixels resolution


Software:

As seen in the previous phones by Sony Ericsson, the Entertainment menu holds the Photo, Music and Video DJ applications, which are simple multimedia editors. Here you will also find Games, the Bluetooth remote control function and the Dictaphone. The innovation here is the presence of the Location services submenu, which includes the Google Maps application, My favourites menu, Status info (accessible only if an external GPS module is present), Log and Settings. All these options demonstrate that G502 can be used for navigation, which is very good. Do not forget that you’ll still need an external GPS module for navigation.

QuadraPop is the only one factory preloaded game that the phone comes with. It is something like Tetris, but you have to get in a group at least four gems of the same color in order to score points. It sounds pretty simple, but it is not. The game is actually much more complicated and you could easily kill some time playing, which after all, is the main idea of such games.