Sony Ericsson’s Elm phone is the most outstanding addition to the company’s Greenheart family.

GreenHeart phones have been made from materials that are easier to produce, easier to recycle, and generally have a lower impact upon the environment. The primary role of the Elm is to be an eco-friendly phone that has a small carbon footprint and a big feature set. Features have been stumbling block for Sony Ericsson’s previous attempts, but this (and recent attempts) succeed.

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Camera
The Elm boasts both a high quality camera and audio offerings that have become talkpoints of the latest Ericsson phones. This features a 5.0 Megapixel camera, enhanced by Sony-standard, high-quality Carl Zeiss lens, which includes auto focus and an LED flash. The camera also allows for video recording, face detection, smile detection and even uses an in-built GPS to geotag photos.

The excellent music player offers support on a large variety of file formats, including MP3 and AAC, as well as including the company’s proprietary TrackID application – simply push a button, hold your phone up to a music source, and the device will use the internet to analyse the song you are listening to and return its title and the artist’s name.

Audio
Another big audio application, and new to a non-Walkman handset, is SensMe. SensMe scans your music collection and generates playlists according to a song’s tempo and mood, taking the hassle out of listening to music to that fits your mood… Pretty cool, eh? No more hours spent putting together your mood-dependent playlist.

The one downside to the phone’s audio offering is that the headphone jack is proprietary, meaning that you’re either stuck with the included Sony Ericsson headphones, or you will have to purchase an adapter to allow you to plug anything better into the handset.

Video
The device also offers video playback, with support for H.263, H.264 and MP4 playback, as well as a YouTube application – however the 2.2 inch screen, supporting 256,000 colours, is not going to replace a home cinema experience (or even an iPhone) anytime soon. But will buying an iPhone help save the planet? No.

Connectivity
For connectivity, the device rivals any smartphone on the market, supporting both GPRS and 3.5G connections. It also has Wi-Fi, a feature usually reserved for smartphones, and Bluetooth version 2.1.

This array of connections is good for the social networking applications available for the handset, allowing you to keep in touch with friends and family quickly on the move through 3G, and super-quickly at home via Wi-Fi. Applications include Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and viewing and uploading to YouTube – in fact, a widget allows you to control all of these straight from the phone’s homescreen.

Speed
However, with this much going on it does take its toll on the phone’s processor, pushing the device to its limits. So some slow-down in navigation can occur when too many applications are running concurrently, such as listening to music while trying to navigate through the depths of the phone’s filesystem.

But when not trying to run two things at once, the fast download speed of the 3.5G connection also allows Google Maps and WisePilot navigation to work almost flawlessly, downloading maps as-needed from the internet, while tracking your direction with the GPS.

Memory
Disk space won’t be an issue with the Elm either; the handset supports external M2 cards up to 8GB in size for all your rich-media needs. However, as with the headphone jacket, the M2 is another proprietary Sony format and is more expensive than the microSD alternative.

Weight
The Elm is lightweight, just 90g – measuring 110 x 45 x 14mm and with a 48-hour battery-life – and could easily fit in the pocket of the environmentally conscious.

The best thing about the Elm is that it is can be discussed as a mobile phone, with all the features to match, rather than just a low-par eco-phone (as we wrongly expected), and lacks the limitations that have plagued Sony Ericsson’s previous incarnations. The Elm is not just a novelty item backing the recent eco-friendly craze but is actually a very decent mobile phone.

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