Sony Ericsson Yari review

The Yari is one of a number of new handsets with peculiar made-up names from Sony Ericsson (others include the Aino and Elm), this one goes for broke in an area which almost all mobile phones cover but few push to the front: Gaming. And, to be more precise about it, ‘gesture gaming’. Yep, that’s right. A key element of the Yari's appeal is the fact that you can flail about to have fun. Nintendo Wii mini style? Well, not quite.

You get a lot of games. Our Yari had twelve of them plus a carousel you can set up as a launcher and assign to the left softmenu. The games aren’t all gesture controlled, and some of those that are leave a lot to be desired.

Fitness just seems to use the front facing camera (which doubles for two way video calling, natch) to monitor your movement through a number of exercises, counting as it goes. You need to prop the handset up on the provided neat little folding stand for it to work. It’s not really a game and the process is a bit tedious. We’d rather not do our exercises in front of our mobile.

We much preferred the tennis game which also uses the camera and had us waving our arms about madly in an attempt to smash, lob and slice in order to beat our opponent. The bowling game doesn’t need the camera. Instead it requires a lot of phone flapping just to knock over a few skittles.

Other games just use the accelerometer. We really liked the somewhat childlike LocoRoco which just uses the accelerometer and keypad in a scrolling collect-the-objects type scenario.

Well, that’s enough on the gaming specifics. The point is that the phone does seem quite responsive to gestures, and the camera based games work quite well. But there are a couple of significant issues.

Unlike a games console the screen used here is small – the Yari’s display is just not up to more complex games. You need to be quite close to the screen to see all the tennis action, for example.

And you can’t really play the gesture and camera using games outside. Unless you want to prop your handset up on a wall and flail around like a mad thing. Nuff said.

In other respects this is a quite reasonably specified handset. It is a fairly nicely designed slider, not too large for the hands at 100mm tall, 48mm wide and 15.7mm thick.

It weighs 115g. There are two small gaming buttons above the 2.4 inch screen and beneath it two equally small softmenu buttons which are absolutely dwarfed by the Call and End, Cancel and Activity Menu buttons. The navi key has a music shortcut on its top edge.

Inside the slide the number pad is large. It is made from a single sheet rather than separate keys, and we couldn’t text at top speed, but did manage to bash out the messages fairly quickly.

The black, white and sliver livery is quite attractive, and while the front is shiny the backplate is matte so that there’s no danger of fingerprint litter becoming a problem and gripability while gaming is maximised.

Despite our most concerted efforts to get Sony Ericsson to use 3.5mm headset adaptors throughout its handset range, the Yari has the bog standard, proprietary, huge Sony Ericsson side-mounted connector, and the headset itself is one piece.

This is a big let down on what is supposed to be such a fun handset. And doubly so since Sony Ericsson is clearly pushing the music capability having given the Yari two backmounted speakers. Stereo. Though there are so close together as to make the idea meaningless, really.

On the other hand Sony Ericsson has responded to our clarion calls for microSD memory card support and there is a slot on the right edge of the casing. So you can easily augment the 60MB of built in storage with generic microSD cards.

We’ve already mentioned a front facing camera. The main back-mounted camera shoots at 5-megapixels and has a small LED flash. The side button needs quite a seriously hard press to launch the camera taking it past the first ‘click’. At first we though it did not have a launch function.

There are a few camera gizmos on board including macro mode, face and smile detection, geotagging and Photo fix which smartens up the light balance and contrast after you’ve taken a photo. It did seem to make many of our test shots more vibrant, especially indoors ones.

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