Sony Ericsson T303 been for the past few years? This seems like an odd question, but Sony Ericsson's press photos show the handset is stuck in 2004, and a look at the feature set certainly reinforces the impression that the T303 is a blast from the past.
Please don't misunderstand us - the T303 has a lot going for it. It's a very compact device, it has a long battery life and it looks good. But the specification reads like a handset from a few years ago. Indeed, the T303 is broadly similar to the 3-year-old Nokia 6111. The Sony Ericsson T303 has a basic 128 x 160 pixel TFT display, a 1.3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth and an FM radio. Overall size is 83 x 47 x 15mm and the T303 weighs 93 grams. That's quite a bit slimmer than the Nokia 6111, but otherwise almost identical in size and weight.. and features.
Bizarrely, the Sony Ericsson T303 comes with a multimedia player, but just 8MB of non-expandable memory. Yes, we did say megabytes and not gigabytes. That's enough for about a single song and no more, so really the media player is only useful to support MP3 ringtones. More usefully, the FM radio comes with TrackID to help identify the song that is playing.
Talktime is an impressive 9 hours, with up to 16 days standby time, significantly better than the similarly sized Nokia 6111. There will be three variants, the T303a is a 850 / 1800 / 1900 MHz GSM variant for North America, the T303c is a 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz version for China and the T303 is a 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz version for the rest of the world (in previous Sony Ericsson naming conventions, this would have been the T303i).
It's an attractive looking phone, but a very basic one - so price will be a key issue. Sony Ericsson have not said how much the T303 is going to cost, but we would say that anything more than £70 / €100 / $140 or so SIM free would be too expensive. The T303 should be available from mid 2008.
Sony Ericsson T303 at a glance
Available:
Mid 2008
Network:
GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 (T303 & T303c)
GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 (T303a)
Data:
GPRS
Screen:
128 x 160 pixels, 65k colours
Camera:
1.3 megapixels
Size:
Compact clamshell
83 x 47 x 15mm / 93 grams
Bluetooth:
Yes
Memory card:
No
Infra-red:
No
Polyphonic:
Yes
Java:
Yes
GPS:
No
Battery life:
7 hours talk / 16 days standby
