Phil

7:37 p.m. Monday, 21 September 2009

While the W508a is nearly as great as you write about there is one real problem and that is that the exterior screen is next to impossible to read during daylight.
There appears to be no way of correcting this.

.

9:04 p.m. Monday, 25 January 2010

The texting is also weird compared to other phones i have had.

Annabel

4:23 p.m. Monday, 1 February 2010

How much for W508a

Mike_P

8:58 p.m. Sunday, 21 February 2010

My comments are largely negative, but my purpose is to cover the details missed in almost every review I have read about this device.

The camera takes poor photos with an ugly blue hue unless you're in a very well lit area and the minimum distance is 10cm. The video is saved as mp4 and it uses excessive jpg compression, not much good for anything but real close up stuff and it suffers from the same lighting issues.

The media player can be a pain when carrying the phone in your pocket with other stuff, the play button is too easily activated, certainly not good when driving, you could get pulled up for using your phone when all you're trying to do is to stop the music playback.

The 4-way D-Pad can be difficult to use, making it too easy to enter an app you don't want to open.

When the default connection mode is set to mass storage device, the phone has to restart after plugging in to a USB port.

For Mac and Linux users, the only option is to use Mass Storage Mode, the phone will not operate in any other mode, so that makes tethering unavailable to any platform other than Windows. This makes the feature as advertised incorrect. If it does not work on all platforms, then the advertising is not accurate and this feature should be either correctly advertised, or rectified to work on all systems.

Basically, this is a good phone, and music player, not much else. You can purchase an adapter cable to use 3.5mm stereo plugs if you should need to.

It would be nice to be able to remove useless apps like facebook from the phone, though it's a nice touch to have a rudimentary google maps on the phone, but at what data cost???

txting has a neat feature called threading where all texts to and from your contacts can be viewed as threads, all phones should use this feature.

Sony's manual is typically pathetic, covering only a smidgen of the phones capabilities, you are on your own to find your way around this phone. If you're a technophobe, this phone will be beyond your capabilities, but its good battery life goes in its favour

Heather

5:21 p.m. Wednesday, 3 March 2010

To Phil:
For the problem with reading the screen during daylight is just that you turn up the brightness of the display by going:
Menu
Settings
Display
Then go to the last option and turn it up to 100%. Then it is easy to read.
To Mike_P:
With the media player all you have to do to turn off the play button is to push down the key button on the right hand side of it. That way it wont turn on when hit by something.
Also:
T9 is turned off by holding down the star key when typing a message.

My only problem with it is that the screen freezes COMPLETLY after I turn it on and enter my PIN number. If anyone knows how to fix this then PLEASE tell me.