The crazy Sony Ericsson phone names keep on coming, with the Satio, Aino and Yari to be joined by the Naite (pronounced Nate-ey). But Naite has another noteworthy trait separating it from its funky named brethren in that it is the first Sony Ericsson phone to carry the Greenheart badge — a reminder of Sony Ericsson's commitment to environmentally-friendly phone production and distribution.
How green is your mobile?
One of the major areas of environmental consideration is in the materials used to produce the pint-sized Naite. The company promises to use at least 50 per cent recycled materials in the casings, though you'll struggle to prove this to hippy friends as the casing of the Naite looks identical in build and quality to previous low-end Sony Ericsson handsets. Perhaps if it was made from hemp and had the look and feel of a Hessian bag this message would be clearer, but then who wants a crumby looking mobile?
Naite also comes bundled with a new mobile phone charger that is designed consumes less power and is designed to suck less juice when left plugged into a power source without the phone connected. The box you receive your new phone in is also dramatically smaller than most phone boxes we encounter, which not only saves on the packaging materials used, but also means more handsets per transport pallet which then leads to less emissions from the various forms of transport used to ship the phones around the world.
Lastly, Sony Ericsson has installed a couple of green-focused apps that help you measure your daily carbon emissions, but these are merely pandering to our guilty consciences and are not particularly well thought out tools. By adding in your guesstimate of how far you travel in cars and planes and your household energy usage, the Naite then tells you how bad you are, really nothing mind-blowing here.
Simple Simon
Once you get passed your own smug sense of world-saving self satisfaction, the Naite is a very simple mobile phone. Its standout feature is HSDPA web browsing, though this is hampered by a simple, sluggish pre-installed web browser. This speed is better used with the excellent on-board Facebook and Twitter clients. Facebook, in particular, is fantastic; the client is clean and easy to navigate and you can do most of your daily cyber-stalking while on the bus or train without too much trouble. You can even keep your recent friends status updates on your home screen as an animating ticker of the latest gossip and lunchtime desires.
The hardware of the Naite is very run-of-the-mill Sony Ericsson. The combination of a 2.2-inch QVGA display with the all-too familiar nav-pad and keyboard layout is common to just about every line of Sony Ericsson products over the past few years. This is a tried and tested design formula, and while it's not an exciting new phone, it is a solid one with easy-to-use buttons and controls.
Alongside its simple design, the Naite sports a basic raft of media capture and playback capabilities. On the back of the phone you find a flash-less 2-megapixel camera drilled into the textured chocolate-brown battery cover. The camera is featureless on the software side too, with no autofocus and only limited settings to play with, but is redeemed ever-so slightly by a fast 0.5 second shutter speed. For the media you already own, the Naite supports MP3, AAC and WMA audio files and MP4 and WMV video files.
Performance
It's hard to fault the performance of this little trooper, but equally hard to identify points of the phone to praise. Menu navigation is swift and the opening of common apps, like the camera and the browser, is suitably fast. Web browsing, as mentioned above, takes an eternity before the 3G connection starts to download any data when pulling up a web page.
Battery life is decent, at 4.5 hours talk-time as estimated by Sony Ericsson. During our tests we saw about three days between charges, which is good, but not outstanding. Call quality is up to Sony Ericsson's excellent standard, with all the calls we've made sounding clear and loud.
Overall
There has been a rise in new technologies due to big companies shifting focus to environmentally-friendly alternatives and with it, higher price tags, like Toyota with the Prius for example. Sony Ericsson follows suit in the price department — its AU$399 RRP is twice as much as we'd expect to pay — but doesn't really offer new technology. Sure you get the new low-power wall charger, but the phone itself is a bare-bones 3G handset, and though it performs well, it doesn't come close to justifying this ludicrous ticket price.
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