Sony Ericsson Yari

The Sony Ericsson Yari is all about the motion control gaming. From the desktop screen, users get a carousel of games loaded onto the phone. It's a quick way to jump right into the gaming features. This is the sort of simple interface tweak that we like to see on specialized phones. Unfortunately, once we started jumping into the games, we were somewhat less impressed.

To test the motion sensitive gaming, company reps showed us a bowling game that comes loaded onto the Sony Ericsson Yari. Basically, you swing the phone like a bowling ball and the motion affects the onscreen game. We've seen similar games on other smartphones, and not just the Apple iPhone, but also the Sony Ericsson W995 that we reviewed recently. In our hands-on look, we didn't see any games that were terribly impressive, at least not graphically speaking. Hopefully, the gesture controls will be responsive and intuitive, and some fun gameplay could make up for a lack of graphical prowess. Besides the motion sensitivity, the Sony Ericsson Yari will also get a couple extra buttons for games.