The new buzzword for the 21st century is surely the environment; from global warming to carbon emissions to Al Gore, the environment has more or less became one of the most urgent concerns in the world today. Companies are continually being told to clamp down on how many toxins they release into the air and the average citizen is also being warned – almost daily – over the harm that they do to the environment through simple activities such as driving a car. So you will not be surprised to find that your mobile phone is also coming under attack for causing harm to our environment. So Sony Ericsson have taken the initiative and hope to tap into the growing number of people becoming serious concerned about our carbon footprint by launching their Greenheart range of mobiles phones. These mobiles are designed to be environmentally friendly not only in their usage but also their production. Sony Ericsson argue that they exclude any unnecessary materials in the production of this range of mobiles and well as making the manual in-phone as opposed to wasting paper on an ‘actual’ phone manual. Furthermore this range is characterized by being energy efficient and decreasing their CO2 emissions by about 15% when compared to the average phone.
So it is to the new mobile in this Greenheart range that we turn out attention to – the Sony Ericsson Cedar. The design of the Sony Ericsson Cedar reminds us of the way mobiles were about 5 or 6 years ago; simple, almost like a standard digital house phone. It is not touch screen and has a simple design and user interface. It is also a very light phone and only weights 84 grams and measures 111 x 49 x 16mm Indeed the actually specifications of the Sony Ericsson Cedar are quite similar to the Sony Ericsson Naite that was released last year so don’t expect the Cedar to be significantly difference in terms of price when it is made available. The Sony Ericsson Cedar has a 2.2 inch 240 x 320 pixel display and will feature a 2 mega pixel camera and it comes with flash – quite a surprise actually considering the amount of high end mobiles that don’t come with the flash option these days. So while you might not be taking HD crystal clear images with the Cedar you can certainly take some decent quality photographs in low lightening conditions and considering the expect price of the phone it is actually pretty good value. In addition to this, the Cedar has support to record video at 30 fps so taking videos and uploading them to youtube will not result in any worse quality that most mobiles out there right now.
The Sony Ericsson Cedar is not marketed to be an ‘internet’ mobile however it more than holds its own in this department. There is no Wi-Fi – although this was to be expected – however it does have HSDPA, super fast 3G, so doing simple browsing – like checking your Facebook and looking up news – will be easily done on the Cedar. Indeed the Sony Ericsson Cedar supports Widgets and through these you can easily keep up to date with any status updates and feeds straight from your social networking profile – Facebook, Myspace Twitter etc… While this is not making the Cedar a multimedia or mobile internet paradise it is certainly more than sufficient for the market that Sony Ericsson is aiming the Cedar at.
An interesting feature is the 3.5 mm audio jack – not interesting in the sense that it is groundbreaking as most mobiles now come with this connection – however, couple this with the option of expanded the Cedar’s memory to 16 GB with a microSD card and you have yourself a backup mp3 player that can hold just as many audio files as the iPod Nano. It might not replace your actual mp3 player but it is an adequate backup device. An interesting feature of the Sony Ericsson Cedar is the fact that you can import contacts directly from the s60 operating system from a memory card. Perhaps an obvious ploy to attract Nokia users to switch over to Sony Ericsson but at the same time it is certainly a useful and interesting feature of a phone that was expected to be as basic as you can get.
With all of this in mind then we actually have quite a decent phone here. Sony Ericsson is clearly trying to tap into the environmentally friendly market and will probably succeed. Even the packaging that the Sony Ericsson Cedar comes in is minimal and we have already talked about the manual being in-phone as opposed to a ‘hard copy’ to save on paper and you are also supplied with a low energy charger. In fact, the battery on the Sony Ericsson Cedar will give you about 3.5 hours of talk time which certainly isn’t bad and about 20 days on standby. So what do we end up with? A mobile that is clearly marketed towards those who are concerned about the state of our planet and want a simple, basic but functional phone. Well, the Sony Ericsson Cedar certainly provides this. The camera isn’t going to be taking any high resolution Life magazine winning pictures but is more than capable of taking a few snaps for Facebook or to set as wallpaper on your phone. Internet wise and the Sony Ericsson Cedar actually outweighs the Sony Ericsson Yendo in that it has 3G so basic web browsing will be no problem on this smart little phone. The support of Widgets also means that it will be easy enough to keep up to say with all your social networking goings on. Cosmetic wise and the Cedar isn’t the sexiest phone on the market however, trying not to repeat ourselves, but it isn’t meant to be ‘sexy’. It is designed to be cheap, functional and, perhaps, most importantly, environmentally friendly; the Sony Ericsson Cedar succeeds in all these departments. You can leave your own Sony Ericsson Cedar reviews or check out the Sony Ericsson Cedar deals currently available.
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