Sony Ericsson have announced the new Sony Ericsson T700, a mid-range phone that’s the spiritual successor to Sony Ericsson’s T610. For those of you who don’t remember the T610, it was the first phone that put Sony Ericsson on the map. It wasn’t a high-end phone, but for some reason it was extremely popular, and people not only bought it by the barge-load, they also seem to have a soft spot for it, too.

Given that the old T610 was released five years ago, comparing it to the new T700 gives an excellent impression of just how far phones have come in the past five years. So read on after the jump for a direct comparison between the T610 and T700.

Sony Ericsson T700

First up, the new T700. It’s a mid-range candybar phone, just like its predecessor, that even adopts the old T610’s looks. It’s thinned down a bit since the old days though, as the T700 is 10mm thin compared to the T610’s positively obese 19mm.

The T700 isn’t brimming with features, but you do get a decent 3.2 megapixel camera, 2″ TFT screen, 512MB of memory, MP3 player, external speakers, video recorder and player.

More impressively, the T700 is a quad-band GSM phone that also comes with HSDPA, meaning you can download videos over the air at 3.2Mbps and watch them quickly after starting the download, or even stream them direct to your phone over the air.

In short, it’s a nice mid-range phone with a good feature set that looks good and should be rather cheap when it’s launched. The Sony Ericsson T700 release date is set for the first part of Q4 2008 (i.e. October!)

Sony Ericsson T610

Now for the fun part. We’ve seen what the T700 will offer when it comes out in a few months’ time. What did the T610 offer for the same money five years ago?

• The T700’s camera offers 3.2 megapixels. The T610? Just 352 x 288 pixels. That’s a 0.1 megapixel camera, for those of you who prefer megapixellage!
• The screen of the T700 is a 2″ TFT screen offering 240 x 320 pixels and 262,144 colours, whereas the old T610 was only an old STN screen offering 65,000 colours and a screen size of just 128 x 160 pixels!
• The T610’s browser offered only WAP support (for those of you who remember it); there was no HTML web browsing, but then you wouldn’t want it, as the fastest download speeds the T610 could offer was just 40kbps. Ouch!
• Finally, storage. The T700 offers 512MB, whereas the T610 came with a laughable 2MB of onboard storage.

Sony Ericsson T700 vs Sony Ericsson T610

Put another way, the T700 offers a camera with a resolution 3,100% times better; a screen that’s 275% bigger; a data transfer rate that’s 7,900% faster than the T610; and a 25,500% increase in storage capacity! Add to that all the other fancy extras of the T700 (video playback, recording, streaming, MP3 player, stereo speakers, radio, Bluetooth streaming, and full Web browsing), and it’s pretty clear that we really have come a long, long way in just five years.

[Source: GMSArena]