Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman Preview

Introduction:

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman: a reincarnation of a legendary brand or just an attempt to catch the eye with the familiar logo? The word Walkman walks us into the sweet times of portable cassette and CD players, bringing nostalgia for the good ol' past. A risky business, playing on those feelings is, but the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman takes the risk of rising the Walkman brand from the ashes in a budget feature phone. It doesn't hold much ground in today's smartphone world with a humble 3-inch capacitive touchscreen, but it does offer a couple of cool new functions.

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman is all about music lovers on the go, of course. The funky Zappin key magically plays only a preview of the chorus of a song and with a karaoke function, you can sing along to your favorite tunes and your neighbor's horror.

Design:

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman looks tiny. It's super flyweight tipping the scales at the meager 3.1 oz (88g), but it's also not too thick with 0.56” (14.3mm) of body fat. Overall, it's a real toy in your hands – with all the perks of a plastic feel and nostalgic branding.




The 3-inch scratch-resistant capacitive touch screen sports a resolution of only 240 x 400 pixels. On the front, the half-circle home button stands out, a signature feature of Sony Ericsson's latest phones (both smartphones and feature phones). It's practical with its big size, but it also helps brand recognition as no other company has it.


In addition to the standard lock key and volume rocker, there is a dedicated camera shutter key, snapping pictures quickly or taking you into the camera menu if you weren't there yet. The 3.2-megapixel fixed-focus shooter is located on the back and has no flash, but is rather just a plain basic camera.

Interface and Functionality:

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman requires a SIM card to work, but once you insert one, you can get down to business with SE's corner Touch UI. The Mix Walkman is no smartphone, so customizations are stripped to a bare minimum and you're mostly limited to the stock experience. But with a budget device like this, that shouldn't be much of a surprise.


Function-wise, the Mix Walkman covers all the basics with relatively rich contacts and messaging applications. It's a pity that you don't have full on-screen QWERTY, so typing messages is slow on the virtual T9 keypad.

Putting standard functions aside, the handset sports a couple of nifty little features for melomaniacs, reminding us why it carries the legendary Walkman branding. The Zappin key located on top instantly plays the chorus of a song, so you can get a taste of that unknown tune without having to play the whole thing. In all honesty, it does not look like the most useful of features. You can also pick between short and long version of the music preview. Karaoke on the other hand quiets down all vocals to a minimum allowing you (and your friends) to take over and practice your America's Got Talent routine. It's probably our favorite thing about the Mix Walkman as in most cases it does a commendable job suppressing the vocals.


The handset also supports microSD cards of up to 32GB, but sadly, some basic options like copy/paste/moving files were missing. There was no file manager either, so using the SD card turns out to be problematic, but we hope to see these issues fixed in the final version of the handset.

Camera and Multimedia:

The low-end PNX4910 chip supports cameras of only as much as 3-megapixels and with QVGA recording at best. No wonder then that the camera on here is a 3.2-megapixel fixed-focus unit without flash. A dedicated camera shutter key makes image capture easier, but snapping a photo is accompanied by a terribly loud sound, turning heads to the otherwise modest in quality camera. The snapper is very raw, with no adjustable settings of any kind.

When it comes to video, it's all plain and simple – just hit the record and stop buttons. The quality is poor QVGA, or 320 x 240 pixels, only fit for viewing on a small screen. There are no manual settings either.

Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman Sample Video:



When it comes to multimedia playback, though, we struggled to test the Mix Walkman as while it did work with our microSD card, it failed to recognize let alone play back any of our test videos or music, which we hope was another issue that will get fixed in the final unit.

Internet and Connectivity:

No 3G is a big drawback, but you still have GPRS/EDGE and Wi-Fi support, so the phone does have an Internet browser. A very basic one, we'd have to admit, with pages rendering weirdly, getting fragmented all the time, so that even a small and simple webpage will often load as two separate pages on the Mix Walkman. You can't zoom in or out either as double tap and multitouch don't work, while using the volume rocker scrolls the page.


In terms of connectivity, there's also Bluetooth and FM Radio with RDS, but no GPS or maps application.

Expectations:

The pre-order price of the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman reaches nearly $170 (120 euro) off contract, but we don't expect the masses to blindly go after the price only. After all, even at such low-end level, there are some smartphones surpassing the Mix Walkman in functionality significantly like the Samsung Galaxy mini for once.

But the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman tickles with its nostagic Walkman branding. The Zappin feature previewing a song and the Karaoke function are certainly fun, but they just don't seem enough. Sadly, the Mix Walkman doesn't have stellar high ambitions - it's only a budget feature phone with a touch-enabled screen, among the last in its class, which does more to remind us that the Walkman brand is a thing of the past, rather than convince us that it could be resurrected to reality.

Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman Video Preview: