Previews

Hands on with the Sony Ericsson Yari

Motion gaming is here… or is it?

Hands on with the Sony Ericsson Yari
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At a recent flashy shindig in London, Sony Ericsson revealed details on three new handsets due to hit the mobile scene later this year.

Although most attendees were drawn in by the promise of a 12.1-megapixel camera on the Satio, we, being among those afflicted with a love for mobile gaming, were more drawn to the Yari. It’s a handset with a firrn focus on gaming, and promises to bring features not seen in Sony Ericsson handsets outside Japan.

What are these features, then? From a cursory glance at the promotional video of the phone, it seems to be all about gestural motion sensitivity, which bizarrely looks a little like playing a Nintendo Wii without a TV.

However, accelerometer-enabled gaming is nothing new, and several Sony Ericsson phones have even come with snazzy accelerometer games pre-installed. We decided to get a closer look at the Yari to solve the mystery of the missing motion innovation.

Design-wise, the Yari doesn’t offer any spectacular stand-out features. A slider phone with a touch of the Nokia N85’s curviness to it, the Yari is cute and looks at least a little different from other recent Sony Ericsson handsets. It uses the company’s proprietary operating system, meaning it’ll handle just like its forebears.

Gaming-wise, it comes bundled with Tennis, Baseball, Boxing and Bowling, although some of them have to be downloaded from Sony Ericsson’s PlayNow store. Due to some prototype blues - the fact that the Yari wasn’t really working properly - we didn’t get to see all the games.

One we did see was familiar though. Bowling was I-play’s I-play Bowling. By the time the Yari actually comes out, this game’ll be more than a year old - older than the hills in mobile gaming terms.

It also proves that these supposed gestural motions aren’t the Yari’s innovation. We were making them back in May 2008, and we weren't all that impressed back then anyway. Although reviewer Rob Hearn played it on the Nokia N81, the motion functionality was also available on a handful of Sony Ericsson handsets.

A few shovelfuls of digging later and we found out from a cagy Sony Ericsson representative what ’s actually new about the Yari. It’s that it uses the inward-facing camera - the one used for video calling - in its games.

We’ve seen similar camera-enabled games on Symbian phones over the past few years, including Ninja Strike, which we weren’t all that impressed by. Without a breakaway killer game to prove that camera enabled gaming can work, it’s likely to be dismissed once more as a gimmick.

Let’s not be too hasty, though. The tennis game features camera control, and we got to have a look at it.

As you might imagine, you pass your hand over the camera lens whenever the ball reaches you to hit it back. It might have been the busy spotlight-filled background confusing the camera, but the mechanic didn’t work all that well when we had a go - being hit and miss as to whether it picked up the motion at all.

Using the inward-facing camera also brings up the problem we have with the idea of gesture-based gaming that the Yari trailer extols - that you’re obscuring the screen.

Previous camera games we’ve seen have generally used the camera on the phone’s back for this reason. Why use the other camera, then? Is it so that they can boast about their ‘never outside of Japan’ claim? Would we be quite so cynical?

The front camera does make more sense in the included fitness app. Here, it uses the front-facing camera to examine your movements. There still remains a very important question of fidelity, though. Holding the phone in your hand, the camera is always going to move, at least a little, along with your body.

Unlike I-play Bowling, neither Tennis nor Fitness were familiar and, despite an impassioned prod, we couldn’t find out who was behind them. We’re interested because without support from publishers or developers, the bundled games will remain the only ones to use this additional camera functionality anyway.

Sony Ericsson promises many more games will be available for the Yari, but then of course they will. Grand claims aside, the Yari is at heart just another java gaming handset. Indeed, in spite of all out criticisms, the Yari is still a nice-looking handset that has those little things that seem to be a dying breed but are so important to traditional Java gaming - real buttons.

So, we’ve had to let a little of the hot air out of Sony Ericsson’s balloon, but with a 5-megapixel camera and HSDPA connectivity, it still makes sense as a mid-range all-round offering.