It’s a situation I’m sure we’ve all been in: You’re visiting your Nanna and Pop and you pull out your fancy new phone with all the bells and whistles to show them. But where you expect unbridled enthusiasm at your MP3-playing, 5-megapixel photo taking, internet browsing masterpiece of engineering, you instead got looks of confusion.
“Oh, that all sounds like too much for silly old me” they say to you. “All I need is a phone that can make calls and lets me listen to Ray Hadley on 2GB. He makes me feel all warm and tingly inside”. And after you recover from the shock that it was your Pop who expressed his affectations for the AM radio DJ, you realise that there aren’t a great number of AM-radio capable handsets in the world. You know, for the old people who still listen to AM. Thankfully, Sony Ericsson are addressing the problem with their R306 mobile phone.
On top of AM radio, you get… wait for it… FM radio, making this one of the greatest radio phones ever (although there isn’t any internet radio or DAB+ functionality). You also get a 1.3MP camera for photos of your Nanna’s cats, stereo loudspeakers so you can share your love for Ray Hadley with the world, plus standard phone features like MMS, MP3 ringtones and Bluetooth.
The R306 is available now. There’s no word on price in the press release, but given its obvious target demographic, I wouldn’t think it would be too expensive.