Sony Ericsson T303 review: Small is beautiful

Multimedia

The multimedia department is among the weakest points of the compact Sony EricssonT303. The decent mp3 player is the severely limited by the measly 8 MB of onboard storage with no memory card expansion.

With that in mind, even the very basic interface seems too much of an effort. Not to mention the fact that there are even several filters for sorting your tracks. Now, how about that? When the entire music collection boils down to two or three songs, all you need is Loop. And Shuffle gives away a… well… sick sense of humor. At least they didn't bother making optional skins for the player.

The basic music player

Images on the T303 are only accessible via the File manager from the organizer menu. Unfortunately, the viewing options are also scarce. There is no zoom function, and image browsing is quite sluggish. Images can be sent via Bluetooth or MMS, set as wallpaper or played as a slideshow. Moving/copying/renaming is among the few other usable options.

Viewing an image with the File manager • Image gallery is a no go

The integrated stereo FM radio of Sony Ericsson T303 has memory for 20 stations and supports RDS. The TrackID music recognition service is not integrated unfortunately. We thought we can deal with that limitation by minimizing the radio on speakerphone and turning on the TrackID. Sadly this trick doesn't work either, since the phone can run only one java application at a time.

Other than the standard functionality, users can record a song from the radio in a normal or high quality setting. Again, the memory limitation makes this feature useless.

Tuning to an FM station and some options

The Track ID works like a charm, as usual.

TrackID at work

1.3 megapixel camera, just for the sake of it!

Sony Ericson T303 has a mere 1.3 megapixel camera with no video recording or autofocus.

Among the few customizable things are picture size (1.3 MP, VGA), picture quality (fine, normal), effects (black & white, negative), and the night mode. In the main camera menu there are two additional settings - the 2.5 digital zoom (in VGA mode) and exposure correction from -2/+2.

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Sony Ericsson T303 camera menu and options

Image quality is well below passable. It feels the camera is there just for demonstration purposes. The average file size is 180KB.

The camera does not record video and the phone cannot even play clips.

T303 camera samples

Our beta version of the T303 comes with no preloaded games, but the final version will surely have some preinstalled.