Sony Ericsson Yari

Full Review

The Yari is the third Sony Ericsson that has entered our labs without either a Walkman or a Cybershot attached to its name. The most interesting feature that the Yari boasts of is motion-controlled gaming which is unique for a cellphone. After running it through our tests, the Yari emerged a fair product which was thoroughly unremarkable in many aspects.

Features

For its price, the Yari has an expected feature-set. Although, it misses out on Wi-Fi, it does come with 3G support and GPS. Like the other Sony Ericsson phones, the Yari uses a proprietary port for charging and connecting to the PC. The Yari has a regular 2.4-inch screen that is capable of displaying 256K colors and a resolution of 240x320. Like the W995, the Yari is also a slider phone with an alpha-numeric keypad. For imaging it utilizes a 5MP camera with an LED flash. The phone has a meager 60MB of internal memory but the phone does come with a microSD card slot for expanding the storage up to 16GB.

Design & Usability

Unlike the Satio and the Aino, the Yari is not especially great looking. Although, it looks smart it isn’t something that will make heads turn. The Yari’s 2.4-inch screen is also nothing special. Like almost everything else in the phone, the screen is functional but not outstanding; it does however retains its visibility under sunlight. The Yari sports a number of hardware buttons and most of them are large and easy to use, especially the round D-pad set in between. However, some other buttons like the left and right shortcut access buttons below the screen and the volume controls on the right are too thin for comfortable usage. The camera button especially has a bad design since it requires you to press it extra hard to capture images. The alpha-numeric keypad is smooth and not very conducive to blind dialing. Something that stood out (in a bad way) was the Yari’s build quality. When the keypad has been slid out, the phone is susceptible to shaking. Also, the overall impression of the phone is that it uses too much plastic.

The Yari uses the same Flash UI we were used to in older Sony Ericsson phones. As a result, it’s a simple and painless affair to navigate. There was also no hint of slowness and the navigation and menu system that the Yari follows was perhaps the best thing about the phone. Browsing the Internet on the Yari is simple and speedy although there aren’t many features that the default browser comes with. Finally, call quality on the Yari wasn’t very good since I could make out my own voice echoing while talking.

Multimedia

Motion-sensor gaming on the Yari sounds better than it actually is. I tried my luck with a couple of games like Tennis and Fitness and although when the controls worked, it was pretty neat, more often than not, they didn’t. And yes, I did look like a complete fool waving my arms around in front of the phone. The Yari also supports accelerometer based games and the library of games that come pre-installed with the phone is very impressive.

Both imaging and music playback on the Yari were disappointing. The phone has a bunch of features including smile detection, panorama mode, face detection and auto focus but my overall impression wasn’t good. Outdoor shots appeared washed out and the white balance didn’t work as intended. Indoors too, photos appeared washed out and dull (in terms of color). The camera was also unable to focus quickly and a number of times while shooting in macro mode, it just refused to focus on the subject in question. A good thing about the camera is that noise levels were relatively low.

In music playback although the sound quality was decent, the volume level was really low. Also since the Yari doesn’t come with a 3.5mm jack, most people will be forced to use the headphones that come bundled with the phone. These earphones are terrible and made every song I heard sound fuzzy and muddy. On the other hand, the Yari sports external stereo speakers which are surprisingly loud and clear.

Bottom Line

The Sony Ericsson Yari is priced at Rs. 14,600. It could have been great maybe a year back but at present it looks like a phone that decided to play it a little too safe. As a result, the Yari is a decent product but something that will probably be completely forgotten in a couple of months.