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| Sony CMD J70 |
| General |
| Network | Gsm 900 / Gsm 1800 |
| Announced | 4q 2001 |
| Status | Available |
| Size |
| Dimensions | 113 X 44 X 21 Mm |
| Weight | 92 G |
| Display |
| Type | Grayscale Graphic, 4 Shades |
| Size | 96 X 92 Pixels, 6 Lines |
| | - Advanced Jog Dial
- Wallpaper Download |
| Ringtones |
| Type | Polyphonic |
| Customization | Sms |
| Vibration | Yes |
| | - Sms With Sounds And Pictures
- Ringtones Can Be Assigned To Phonebook Entries |
| Memory |
| Phonebook | 500 |
| Call Records | 10 Dialed, 10 Received, 10 Missed Calls |
| Card Slot | No |
| | - Message Templates
- Several Phonebook Groups |
| Data |
| Gprs | No |
| Hscsd | No |
| Edge | No |
| 3g | No |
| Wlan | No |
| Bluetooth | No |
| Infrared Port | No |
| Usb | |
| Features |
| Messaging | Sms, Email |
| Browser | Wap, Html (ms) |
| Clock | Yes |
| Alarm | Yes |
| Games | Yes |
| Colors | |
| Camera | No |
| | - T9
- Calculator
- Scheduler
- Recordable Sounds For Calls And Events
- Built-in Handsfree |
| Battery |
| | Standard Battery, Li-ion |
| Stand-by | 200 H |
| Talk Time | 3 H 20 Min - 6 H |
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Sony - CMD J70Sony CMD-J70
Weight Detail: 92 g / Standby Time: 330h / Talktime: 8h or more / Display Detail: b/w; vier tone; Size: 24 x 26 mm; 96 x 92 Pixel
Advantages Looks nice, Small and sleek
Disadvantages Many niggling flaws, Cannot vibrate and ring, Poor backlighting
To bracket me in with the achingly fashionable kids who Nokia have come to live from would be akin to dropping Bernard Manning into a room with Nelson Mandela to see if they got on. For two years I owned a Motorola brick and only recently upgraded, forcibly due to my own inability to keep the damn thing in my pocket, to a shiny new Sony J70.
Your criteria for choosing this phone will probably be similar to mine - a lighter phone, something new-ish but not in the very top price bracket, the few genuinely useful features to have appeared over the last few years. I wanted something small and light, no more than £100, that can send a ten-word message without pressing a key eight times just to get a 't'. For most intents and purposes the J70 fits these criteria well.
Its length is very similar to the well-known Nokia 3310, the standard by which all others are best measured. It betters it in the width and 'chunkiness' departments being nicely slim and compact and fits into even the tightest jeans pocket, something I've found important as walking around with an unsightly bulge in my pocket is banned under my rehabilitation order. Physically it has a metallic-looking silver front and grey back; nothing spectacular but quite sleek and definitely nothing to be ashamed of in front of your image-conscious friends.
While visually appealing, the main problem I have found with its physical design and layout is the contradiction between the rotating wheel used to navigate through menus, which is on the upper-left hand side of the phone, and the keypad which is across the lower half of the front. For right-handed users, the standard grip of the phone will see you cupping the phone in your palm with your right index finger on the wheel and your thumb naturally resting around halfway down the front, from whence the problem arises: you cannot physically keep your thumb on the wheel while using the keypad. The classic manifestation of the p roblems this creates is when creating a text message; first you navigate through the menus with the wheel, then slide the phone up your hand so your thumb can reach the keypad, then back down to use the wheel to move around your message and edit it, then back up to type a little more. After a while you forget how often the phone is leaping around your palm, until your thumb starts aching from over-use.
The menu system is mostly graphical, the main menu using a circular 'wheel' of options through which you spin the actual wheel to travel through. A novelty at first, within days I longed for the simplicity of the 3310's two buttons and simple text menus; I still cannot instantly recall in which direction you need to spin to get to a particular option. The wheel 'feature' strikes me more as a nice idea in concept, but poor in application. This phone is marketed towards teenagers but the presumed logic behind the wheel, that teenagers will tolerate or enjoy the wheel, is surely flawed; teenagers want to type a message as quickly as anyone else and really, the wheel is always more of a hindrance than a help when using the J70.
This phone is not packed full of novelty features, and will not appeal to anyone looking for a phone more of a status symbol than something you talk into. The games it offers are truly appalling, something agreed upon by myself, my eight year-old sister, my twelve year-old sister and my mother, and from what I have read just about everybody else on the mobile planet. The alarm clock, the one feature I was surprised to find handy, is hidden away five clicks down so the common tasking of switching it on or off quickly becomes repetitive. This really sums up the J70; it has the potential to be a very nice device but the best parts are hidden away by clutter and silly features.
The famous 'record your own ring tone' feature is somewhat over-stated; record in mediocre quality a two-second burst, which can the be set up to play when you receive a call or a message. Again, it is a novelty feature; after three or four silly recordings I found myself back using the standard ring tones, simply because you want to be able to hear when your phone rings and the gruff tone of three male voices shouting in unison is not particularly distinctive.
There are numerous niggling problems with the Sony J70, none of them devastatingly bad but all consistently irritating. The keys are a little shallow and prone to sticking, slowing down fast text typists. They are also accidentally pressed nine times out of ten as you take the phone out of your pocket, meaning you can't see the time without pressing the cancel button. It sounds minor, but when you're doing it on every occasion you want to know the time, every day, it quickly becomes maddening. The keypad backlight is poorly designed, falling in the abyss between lighting the keys so you can see them and over-lighting them so they suffer from glare in any lit conditions and the characters on each key become a blur. The predictive text feature does not match up to Nokia standards, offering a bizarre mix of unknown words while not recognising others.
Probably the most irritating fault with the phone is its inability to vibrate and ring simultaneously. Whereas Nokia phones can be left with both on, so you notice calls whether the phone is in your pocket or on the table, with the J70 you must always remember to set it to vibrate or ring, respectively. Quite often you'll take the phone out of your pocket and leave it on the table without a thought; only when you pick it up later noticing the missed calls you didn't hear because, well, the phone was still set to vibrate rather than ring. It really is a very silly fault and greatly detracts from the other values the J70 has to offer.
In the six months I've been using it, one or two of these nice features have come to prominence; t he genuinely long-lasting battery life, running for a week at a time at minimum; the size, which is literally handy; and, well, that's where the distinguishing features end. In all other respects it is a very suburban phone, fitting in quite nicely and doing its job fairly happily without ever sparkling or winning real affection.
Essentially, the Sony J70 is a poser, a pretty boy hiding a host of character flaws behind a polished look. It functions adequately without ever exceeding yet gains recognition more for its problems than successes. With the advantage of hindsight, I would not pay close to £100 for this phone again, or, for that matter, any other Sony model. It is passable as a second-hand upgrade from your previous older phone, but for the price asked for it as new you'll find yourself becoming irritated with the Sony J70 on the double.
Advantages small, lightweight, easy to use
Disadvantages quiet ringer
I got this phone free with a contract from O2 as my Nokia 6150 was on it's last legs. I wanted something abit more individual than nokias, which everyone seems to have, and also this phone was free with an excellent tariff.
I founf it amazingly simple to use, it looks a lot harder than it is. It has vibra alert, a range of excellent ring tones, the ability to record your own ring tones and message alert tones. The only problem that I can see is that the ringer doesnt get very loud, a problem fo rsome people might be the fact that you won't be able to bring your logos and novelty ringtones from nokia.Shame.
The reception is amazing, very similar to being on a landline. It's very easy to use, the menu is operated by a jog dial and clicking it in selects an option.
The messageing is excellent the predictive text is so much easier to use than Nokia's as the suggested words are displayed on the bottom.
I recommend this phone to everyone |
| Common misspellings on this brand: s9ony , sojy , szony , son7 , son7y , song |
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