Sony C510: the cheapest Cyber-Shots phones in Sony’s portfolio

The Sony Ericsson C510 is a Cyber-shot phone with a mere 3.2-megapixels of camera capability.Sony has launched it Sony C510 Cyber-Shot phone in India. Priced at Rs 12,195, the Sony C510 Cyber-Shot phone is one of the cheapest Cyber-Shots phones in Sony’s portfolio.

Looks and ergonomics present me with some very familiar Sony Ericsson dilemmas though. Overall, this is a neat and light phone for the pocket measuring 107mm tall, 47mm wide and 12.5mm thick. It weighs just 92g. The annoying side-mounted power connector continues to look incongruous but worse, the headset connector that shares the same proprietary socket adds 15mm of width to the phone and makes carrying it in a slim pocket nigh on impossible.


Sony Ericsson has fitted a relatively large screen into this handset and compromised the numberpad in doing so. The 2.3in screen looks sharp and bright, its 320 x 240 pixels presenting no problems.

The numberpad keys are wide enough but they are thin, and in general, the button build quality isn't quite up to Sony Ericsson's usual high standard. Well, this is a mid-range handset after all and maybe a compromise has been made here to keep costs down.

Between screen and keyboard a bank of six buttons provides access to Call and End, the two softmenus, Clear and Sony Ericsson's superb Activity menu - providing a series of tabbed windows that take you to reminders, running apps for quick switching, user-defined on-phone shortcuts and Internet shortcuts.


The problem with these keys is again their size. The Call and End keys are weeny, rounded buttons at the outer ends of this bank. The inner buttons bevel inwards so that they have a distinctive feel but if your fingers are chunky, you may struggle for accuracy.

The four edges of the square navigation key also have shortcut functions. Out of the box, these are set to Media, Contacts, Profiles and Messaging but you can change them all as you see fit. Sony Ericsson always does well in terms of providing shortcuts for getting at phone features and the C510 replicates what I've seen many times before in this respect. It is great, if very samey.