Sony Ericsson Cedar

The basics

Smartphones may be getting more and more feature packed with each iteration, but not everybody wants a touchscreen device or a lengthy contract. This is where the Sony Ericsson Cedar comes in, offering an affordable price tag, simple feature set, and proving itself as the ideal tool for phone calls or text messages.

The good

Considering the price tag, the Sony Ericsson Cedar looks nicer than average, with simple but attractive styling. There's nothing revolutionary about it – you'll find a pretty standard 2.2-inch TFT screen, and a regular alpha-numeric keypad below that – but it's neatly styled, light and compact.

Storage comes in the form of a microSD card reader, letting you add memory cards of up to 16GB. There's also a volume rocker on the side of the Sony Ericsson Cedar, so you'll be able to use it as a music player on the move.

The T9 keypad offers comfortable and responsive buttons, and it's easy to hammer out text messages at speed. It makes a nice change from all the recent touchscreen keypads, with each button offering decent feedback and making it obvious that your actions have registered.

The bad

The Sony Ericsson Cedar is obviously a bargain basement handset when it comes to features. There is a camera, but at 2-megapixels it's nothing to write home about, and other features are similarly limited. That said, you do get 3G connectivity, with an FM radio also built in.

The bottom line

The Sony Ericsson Cedar may look slightly out of place compared to all the recent Android smartphones, but there are still lots of users looking for a simple and affordable feature phone to stay in touch with friends and family. If that's you, then you can do a lot worse than the Sony Ericsson Cedar.