Sony Ericsson has unleashed fully featured new slide phone called “Sony Ericsson Hazel”. The Hazel is very impressive with its minimalist design and it apparently falls in the category of GreenHeart line of phones. Sony has included all higher end phone features in this phone such as 2.6-inch scratch resistant display, excellent multimedia player, FM Radio, 3G, 5 megapixel camera, social networking, snappy processor, attractive UI, plenty of apps, and GPS. It is available at a price of Rs.16000, just go and grab it. We are sure that this phone going to be popular hit. Read the full review to what really its gonna offer.
Design
The design is simple, and but looks decent. The edges are slightly curved. The design has better ergonomic elements. The Hazel comes two colors namely Passionate Rouge and Superior Black. The paint job is done similar to that of Sony Ericsson Elm. The phone is sturdy and gives better grip in hands.
The volume rockers, the camera key are there on the right side. A camera lens along with a LED flash is present on the back side. It can support up to 16GB. The build quality of the Hazel is very good. The Sony’s proprietary port called as “FastPort” serves as headset port, PC file transfer port and as well as charger port.
The Hazel sports a 2.6-inch display that has QVGA resolution and 16 million color support. The screen is secured by mineral glass, which is said to be scratch resistant. The display is beautiful and the image quality is at its best. The images appeared crispy and sharper with vibrant colors. Sun legibility is also very good.
Interface
The Hazel runs on the user interface which the Sony uses in most of its midrange smartphones. The Flash based UI is really very impressive with its looks, multitasking ability and more importantly speed. You can choose either grid view or icon view. Running apps will prevail multitasking. Activity Menu provides quick access to user defined list of favorites, recent events, web and contacts. It also features Flight mode. Homescreen widget has Facebook home screen short cut with live updates. The five widgets present on homescreen are Calendar, Twitter, Facebook, Walk mate and MySpace.
The phonebook has room for 100 contacts & 7000 numbers. The phonebook interface is very convenient to use. The contact book is nicely integrated with social networking sites.
The messaging is fine on this phone and it sports threaded message view. It supports usual messaging form like SMS, MMS, and instant messaging. It supports all POP3/IMAP email accounts. Converting a SMS to MMS is lot easy.
The organizer in the Hazel include Java Applications, Video call, Tasks, Calendar, Notes, Timer, Stopwatch, Synchronization, Calculator File manager, and Torch. The other essential features include an alarm clock, vibrate mode, speaker phone, Dictionary, and more.
Sony Ericsson Hazel comes with an additional apps such as Youtube, Checkbook, GreenCalculator, Standby World 3D, Grocery List, NeoReader, EcoMate, a Calendar Wallpaper, Tracker and AccuWeather,. The Accuweather gives the up-to-date info on weather of your desired city. Checkbook lets you to create different account, you just need to enter balance and then you can start managing your income and expenses. The rest of the apps are self explanatory. We missed document reader and PDF reader that means you can’t preview and edit Microsoft office documents.
The Hazel has GPS with A-GPS support. Wisepilot navigation software is onboard that offers voice guided navigation, turn-by-turn navigation, 3D map views, speed camera alerts, comprehensive route-planning settings, weather and POI.
Connectivity & Internet
The connectivity options are far more than adequate. Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and 3G are all on board for worldwide roaming. 7.2 Mbps HSDPA, as well as 2.0 Mbps HSUPA is also supported. It also features USB (proprietary fast port), Stereo Bluetooth and microSD. It supports remote and local synchronization of calendar events and contacts. It nicely syncs with exchange services like Google. It also includes premium features such as GPS with A-GPS support and Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi doesn’t allow you to stream videos. The media Home application uses DLNA to share media with other DLNA compatible devices like TV or Wi-Fi.
The Hazel comes with an excellent web browser in the form of NetFront 3.5 mobile browser. It renders page quickly and gives smooth browsing experience. Plenty of shortcuts arranged in the tree type are available on the home screen, right under an address bar and search bar. It gives quick ways to access to free content, such as tracks, games, and clips. The browser has RSS feed support and full flash support. You can watch videos of Youtube on browser itself.
Multimedia
The music player in the Hazel is the new Walkman version. The multimedia player supports plenty of audio files such as WAV, MP3, M4A, eAAC+, WMA and etc. Stereo widening and Megabass equalizer preset are also onboard. Autorotation is also possible in the player and it can be run in back ground. It also offers various background themes. We missed a 3.5mm audio jack port on this, so you won’t be able to use your favorite headphones unless you get adapter. There is no shake control. The music player is also features SenseMe that automatically generates the playlists depending upon your mood and TrackID that filters the songs based on the Album, Artist or Genre. The audio quality is excellent with crisp sound and proper bass.
The Hazel is comes with a Media centre where it brings all your photos, videos, movies and music at one place. FM Radio with 20 stations and RDS support is also onboard. The video player interface is simple and convenient to operate. It allows fast-forwarding and fast-rewinding. There is no XviD and DivX support. MediaGo desktop software transfers any video from a computer to phone in compatible format and appropriate format. It also has dedicated Youtube app. The image gallery is same as that of other Sony Ericsson phones and fairly attractive. It is nicely integrated with Geotagging.
Camera
The Sony Ericsson Hazel is equipped with a 5 megapixel camera, which is capable of taking pictures at a maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. The camera has plenty of features to offer that include flash, autofocus, face detection, smile shutter, macro mode, white balance, spot metering, Geotagging, auto rotating, and effects. The image quality is at its best from one can expect from 5MP camera. The photos have plenty of colors, with sufficient brightness and sharpness. There is a front facing camera to assist video calling.
You can also record video on this phone and we have to admit it does decent job. It can shoot VGA video at 30 fps. Flash also works in the video mode too. On the whole the video quality is quite good.
Performance
The call quality is very good. We heard our callers pretty clearly without any distortion. Call quality is great in both in speakerphone and earphone. It uses the Noise Shield for active noise cancellation. Even callers at another end also didn’t report any problem with regard to call clarity.
The Hazel is equipped with 1000 mAh Li-Polymer battery. It has the rated battery life of 10 hours of talktime and 450 hours of standby time. These numbers are pretty decent for this fully featured smartphone.
how do i format this phone i tried to open it 6 times already will someone help urgent pls
how do i format this phone i can’t open it for like 6 times omg
hazel has very poor sound quality wen compared to old walkman phones.
highly dissatisfied with bass effect. even using top end model ear(in ear) phones.
camera s good in bright day light out doors
I would like to know about camera setting and how can I off the flash light while taking picture.
i bought this phone last week , and its really good . The only disappointing thing about this phone is about video call
i can’t use video call when i call
can u help me??
Please can some one tell me is the video calling facility is avilable with this phone
Yesthis phone has video calling facility
I bought this phone a few months back n im really really disappointed.. I was a big Sony Ericsson fan n used to convince my friends to buy Sony Ericsson phones before buying this phone.. The reason being, I owned a SE W580i earlier which was fast and the 2mp camera without a flash, produced great images, the music was good too.. But now I have started hating Sony Ericsson.. Hazel-J20i is not at all a good phone.. its a waste of money.. the 5 mp camera produces good pics only during the day.. in the night its totally useless as the flash it has doesn do the job.. the flash acts like a focus torch n the subject in the picture is blurred spoiling the entire image.. the speakers are equally bad.. therefore the music when played in loudspeaker mode is not audible from a few meters and the clarity is also not good.. the clarity is gud only wen u hear the music thru a good earphone.. but unfortunately the earphones that come wit this model is a Sony Ericsson basic earphone which does not even fit into ur ears properly and keeps falling down.. wen u pay so much for this phone, Sony Ericsson doesnt even provide a good earphone.. the phone does not have a 3.5mm jack either so that u can use a good normal earphone.. on top of all this the phone is slow too, which makes user experience of this phone very bad.. Sony Ericsson is not changing its hardware n software according to the new expectations of the consumers in the market… other companies lik samsung, nokia provide a full touch screen phone wit better music , 3.5 mm jack, good earphones and new user interface, etc for a much lesser price.. why is Sony Ericsson stil stickin to its old big port for charging n earphones.. all this will prove costly for Sony Ericsson.. for a price of 12k in India the phone is not at al worth the money..
hazel is good for me, but u cannot compare with touchscreen phones, my dear. and different companies have different policies and stuff, so you actually cannot compare, you can just decide which phone suits u n buy it
it is very sexy and i like very much
this phone is very marvules
thanku
Hi,
I brought hazel and i not happy with this phone. when i take photo with flash, in center of the photo it gives big white spot. sound quality is very poor with head phone. It seems sony tried to reduce cost by reducing quality.
did u flash on a mirror or something that can give off reflection??
i think either u are lucky or unlucky with the sound. some users said that the quality is pretty low, maybe they are used to walkman phones. but i think its pretty good because i’ve never had a walkman phone so maybe i couldn’t compare.
camera is great for me, i used to only have a 2mp camera on my phone..
hi i brought this last month i updated the software but now the widgets is nt working properly … is there any way to change that………..
I bought this mobile one week back after doing good research. This mobile has n numbers of application and really it is awsome.
Only thing I would like to know from you friends if you know is there any software for seeing .pdf / .doc / .xls file in this mobile.
Other wise one can go and blindly buy this mobile
Ye, there is. You can find it on the net, for example on the mobile9
Hi, i bought this phone last week , and its really good . The only disappointing thing about this phone is about the music quality .It does not have a bass effect unlike the previous walk men series .
use earphone buds on your earphones. it will work well.