Sony Ericsson G705 review: Slide-o-matic

Well-known user interface

Wi-Fi, built-in GPS and auto rotation are making their way into the midrange and that's the major novelty with G705. They are accommodated on the good old feature phone platform we've known and appreciated across a wide range of Sony Ericsson handsets. The G705 user interface is exactly what we saw in the C905 8MP Cybershot, some top-of-the-line Walkmans and nifty mid-ranger T700.

Yet again, a nice place to start exploring the G705 interface and features is this nice little interactive tool over at the Sony Ericsson website.

As with all recent Sony Ericsson phones, along with the typical 3 x 4 grid, the main menu uses a couple of alternative layouts: rotating and single icon view.

Setting up the main menu layout

Rotating view features three animated front icons on the display, the center one showing the active selection. The other two icons are half-hidden, just as an indication of what comes next. Five other menu icons can be seen in the dim background.

Rotating view layout

The icon view displays a single icon at a time and a vertical bar, which features tiny icons for the other main menu entries. Neither of those view modes works with shortcut keys. Only the Grid view allows quick numeric keypad access - a good enough reason to forget about the other options once you've tried them.

Icon view layout

A common feature of most Sony Ericsson phones is the dedicated Flight mode. When turning the phone on, you may opt to start it directly into Flight mode but the Sony Ericsson G705 cannot work in Flight mode unless a SIM card is inserted. The other irritating thing is that to get in or out of flight mode you will actually need to restart the phone.

Sony Ericsson supports Flash Lite themes, which change the color scheme and wallpaper. Our handset had four themes preinstalled - Clarity, Back to black, Flowers and Gold Lines. Except for the default Clarity theme, the other three are flash based with very pleasing effects and extra features.

Back to black theme

Flowers

The G705 features the well-known Activity menu. The Running Apps tab of this menu offers basic multi-tasking - for example you can run two Java applications and in the same time listen to the radio or music player. The Activity menu also offers quick access to recent events, the web and My Shortcuts menu, which contains a user-defined list of shortcuts to favorite features.