The Sony Ericsson Yari is a new kind of gaming phone. Users can play gesture-controlled games such as Fitness, Bowling or Tennis like with a Nintendo Wii or a Sony Playstation. The movements are registered by the mobile phone either by the integrated accelerometer or by the secondary camera above the display. In addition, there are two gaming keys above the screen and games are also controlled by the number pad. However, you shouldn’t buy the Sony Ericsson Yari just because you love mobile gaming because the gaming fun is limited.

Quadband-GSM and 3G with HSPA

The Yari is 15.7 millimeters thick and weighs 115 grams and looks well made. The sliding mechanism, however, shows some play. The back of the case is rubberized, on the top a shiny plastic coating dominates – fingerprints and traces of fat are always visible. Display and numeric keypad are surrounded by a chrome frame. Users find the classic Sony Ericsson menu on the Yari. Unusual are only the animated bubbles circling around a selected menu item.

The new handset offers everything for making mobile phone calls, messaging, multimedia and accessing the internet via GPRS or UMTS. The Sony Ericsson Yari can be used in GSM networks in 850, 900, 1,800 and 1,900 MHz. Depending on the environment scenario, the user can choose between six telephone profiles. There is also a flight mode which shouldn’t be missing on a gaming cell phone. In GSM mode the Sony Ericsson Yari provides up to eleven hours of talk time, in UMTS mode it will still be at least 4.5 hours.

Mobile Data Services and Email

For mobile data transmissions the Yari supports HSPA with a download speed of up to 7.2 mbps and an upload speed of up to 2 mbps and can be used as modem for a notebook or netbook. The NetFront 3.5 browser of the Sony Ericsson Yari sports just the most important features. The display with 240 x 320 pixels resoulution and 262,144 colors is too small to properly view online content anyways. For mobile data services users of the Yari need an appropriate data plan, since the Sony Ericsson handset does not support WiFi. To prevent the disruptive switching between GPRS and UMTS, it is possible to choose an UMTS-only mode for mobile data transmission.

The Sony Ericsson Yari supports Microsoft Exchange and quasi-push email for several email services (SMTP, POP3 and IMAP). The user can specify whether only subject lines or the entire messages should be transmitted to the phone at regular intervals. What I noticed when testing: The email client of the Yari shows emails with HTML formatting and links, but not with images included.

On the phone a Youtube player is installed. The Yari also has an integrated GPS receiver and preinstalled navigation services such as Google Maps and Wisepilot in English.

Entertainment Features

Entertainment features of the Sony Ericsson Yari include a music and video player and an FM radio. The music player can be directly started by pushing the main 5-way key and offers several preset sound profiles, TrackID, playlists and SenseMe. Unfortunately, the Sony Ericsson Yari does not have a 3.5-millimeter socket for connecting your favorite wired headsets. With the right headset, the sound quality of the music player is decent. Even the phone’s external speakers sound surprisingly loud and clear. For stereo sound on your bluetooth headset the Yari supports the bluetooth profile A2DP.

The 5-megapixel camera of the Sony Ericsson Yari features an auto-focus, a macro mode, a panorama mode, multiple scenes, video recording, face and smile detection, spot measurement as well as geotagging. Under good lighting conditions the camera provides relatively sharp photos while colors come out weak. Photo quality is not as good as for pictures taken with the Sony Ericsson C905. The user of the Sony Ericsson Yari can subscribe to photo feeds, and directly upload images from phone to web portals. Thanks to HSUPA support this works fast even with large image files. Video clips can be recorded with a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels at 30 frames per second. For storing music, photos, videos or other files on the handset there are 60 MB of disk space available. Via a microSD card storage capacity can be increased by up to 16 GB.

For synchronizing contacts, appointments, music, photos and videos the phone is simply connected via a USB cable to the computer. The handset is immediately recognized by Windows, new drivers must not be installed. The PC user can access both the phone memory as well as the memory card.

At the end of the day a normal phone

The Sony Ericsson Yari is a great looking cell phone with multimedia and special gaming features and a good battery. However, telephone, messaging and mobile internet features and applications are not impressive and with limited purpose. The Yari is available at German online stores for EUR 215.00 without contract.

Features of the Sony Ericsson Yari:
GSM Networks: 850, 900, 1,800, 1,900 MHz
Data transfer: GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSPA 7.2/2.0 mbps
Connectivity: Bluetooth, USB
Display: 240 x 320 pixels, 262,144 colors
Keyboard: numeric
Camera: 2592 x 1944 pixels, autofocus
Storage: 16 GB with microSD card
Size: 100.0 x 48.0 x 15.7 mm
Speaking Time: 11 hours

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Read more about the Sony Ericsson Yari at www.teltarif.de (in German).