RRP AU$549.00
Good: Sharp design, Great battery life, MS Exchange email support, Good camera.
Bad: Gesture games are rubbish, No 3.5mm headphone socket, Keypad design makes texting difficult.
The Yari looks great but doesn't have stellar features or applications. If you're in it for the games then be prepared for a serious disappointment.
Subtlety isn't something we encounter too often when reviewing mobile phones, but if anyone is to deliver a subtle elegance in its design aesthetic, it's Sony Ericsson. The Yari isn't a high-end phone, its RRP of AU$549 places it somewhere in the middle of the road, and from a distance it looks like another boring handset. Up close though, you discover something quite beautiful in its black and white composition, its asymmetrical curving white trim and oddly shaped camera key — the gentle ridges that define the keys on the T9 keypad.
While we find this handset beautiful to behold, we don't find it fantastic to use. The aforementioned keypad design is cool to look at, but it's essentially a flat plastic surface with raised peaks, and while this is nice to slide your fingers across, it makes it difficult to type on quickly and accurately. The same can be said for the navigation panel under the phone's screen. Again it looks great, with careful, subtle design, but the buttons aren't easy to use without care.
If you've heard anything about the Yari it's no doubt about the phone's gaming prowess, Sony Ericsson's first gesture-controlled gaming phone. For most gamers the following statements are probably completely redundant, but we'll say them anyway: these games suck like a Dyson cyclonic vacuum cleaner. Of the 10 games pre-installed, five of them are controlled by a player's gestures recorded by a front-facing camera, similar to the EyeToy on the Playstation. There's Baseball, Boxing, Bowling, Tennis and Fitness, with only Bowling responding well to gestures and none of them coming even close to being fun.
On the flipside, the games controlled by either the number pad or an in-built accelerometer are mostly fine for killing time. There's LocoRoco, a motion puzzler controlled by tilting the phone, Bubble Town, which is like Bubble Bobble with a story tacked on, and the self-explanatory FIFA 10 and Guitar Rock Tour.
The Yari comes with all the hardware you'll need to connect to the web, including HSDPA data transfers, but no Wi-Fi. The web browser is OK for short sessions of Google searches, but the combination of the browser and smallish screen make reading your favourite desktop websites a feat of patience and sharp eyesight. Yari also has GPS on-board and a range of location-based services installed, including Google Maps and a navigation app called WisePilot.
Sony Ericsson's excellent media browser is present here too, giving the same excellent user experience we've seen recently in the W995 amongst others, with album art display and access to a range of good equaliser presets. On the back of the phone, alongside the 5-megapixel camera and flash, are external speakers which are surprisingly loud and clear. Less impressive is Sony Ericsson's lack of a 3.5mm headphone socket or adapter to plug in standard headphones.
One area of the phone that definitely meets our expectations is the camera. We're not often fans of Sony Ericsson cameras, especially in this price range, but the Yari is one of the exceptions. The photos we've taken so far have been colourful and with decent focus, perfect for capturing those impromptu moments with family, friends or clowns, etc.
We have no complaints about the way Yari processes common tasks. Throughout our tests the Yari remained stable and lag-free, executing applications quickly even when others remain open in the background. Data transfers were slower than you'll get with a high-powered smartphone, but as we said earlier, this isn't a great phone for web browsing on the whole. Call quality is alright, but not spectacular. The earpiece speaker on our review unit tended to be a little muffled, making it hard to hear when outside near traffic.
Sony Ericsson gets two big thumbs up for battery life, though. While using the Yari we charged the phone on either the third or fourth day, making it twice as battery efficient as the large display touchscreens available.
The Yari looks great but doesn't have stellar features or applications. The phone is fine and the battery is good, but this can be said for most phones we review. The web browser, games and navigation are mediocre features with limited purpose, and the music player would have been great if Sony Ericsson got past its insistence on using a proprietary port for connecting headphones.
