Sony Ericsson R300 Theoretically Available

Sony Ericsson has removed the "coming soon" sign from the official presentation page of its R300 handset, which means that in the next few days the phone should be available for purchase, probably in India and Europe at first.

The R300 was unveiled by the Swedish-Japanese company back in January, at the same time as the R306, another phone from Sony Ericsson's new Radio line-up.

Since the R-series is meant to offer affordable devices, Sony Ericsson R300 is a handset that will not cost too much (although its exact price is not known for now). This makes it a basic-featured phone, of course, but there are lots of users who need this kind of phones, hence Sony Ericsson might sell lots of R300 units.

Unlike the R306 model, which is a clamshell, the R300 is a candybar that comes in two color versions: "steel black" and "antique copper". Its highlights are: stereo FM and AM radio with RDS and dedicated keys on the back case, a good-quality loudspeaker and a pair of stereo headsets.

The other features of R300 include tri-band GSM connectivity (900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz for the R300i version and 850 / 1800 / 1900 MHz for the R300a version), a 1.8 inch display with 128 x 160 pixels and 65K colors, Music player, TrackID, Bluetooth, Web and email capabilities, a VGA photo camera, image viewer, organizer, handsfree, stopwatch and so on.

Unfortunately, the music experience that R300 can offer is mainly related to its radio capabilities, because the handset has only 8MB of internal memory and no microSD card slot, hence users will be able to store only a few songs inside the phone.

A nice thing about the Radio candybar is that it's both small and lightweight, measuring only 101 x 46 x 12 millimeters (4.0 x 1.8 x 0.47 inches) and weighing 75 grams (2.6 ounces). Also, the battery of R300 is said to offer a talk-time of up to 9 hours and a stand-by time of nearly 400 hours.