Three years ago, I bought my first digital music player: The Sony NW-70D (a.k.a “The novelty lighter”) had a whopping 256Mb of memory, didn’t play MP3s, and set me back a mere £225. Not long before, I’d bought my first digital camera: The Digital Dreams Epsilon 2.1 Megapixel camera set me back just under £100. At the time, I was using the wonderful Ericsson T39 mobile phone (green screen and a huge fat aerial, but awesome all-round). Naturally, this last one was free, given that it is largely unnecessary to ever pay for a mobile phone handset in the UK.

So. Three devices, three functions, each proficient in its field. Except the camera, which was fairly crappy, it should be pointed out. Total cost: £325.

On Tuesday, I took delivery of a shiny (and slightly chavvy-white, but I’m coming to terms with that) Sony Ericsson W800i. This single device that has more memory than the NW-70D, takes better pictures than the Epsilon, and has a far better technical spec as a phone than the T39. Oh, and it was free. Ok, technically since it’s a mobile phone, and I’m on a monthly contract I am paying for it, but not only did I get a new phone, but I’ve negotiated my monthly cost down to £14 for all the minutes and messages I need, so I still feel like I’m ahead…)

If I converge any further, I might just implode…

Here it is boxed up and ready to go…

And here it is, out of its box, waiting to be prodded. Mmm…

And finally, for now, here it is all lit up and orange. Ooh…

Phone Review

Even with the walkman capability, even with a 2MP camera, if the W800i is a dog of a phone, is it worth bothering with? With that in mind, it’s a relief to see that SE haven’t played much with their standard phone look and feel. I moved from Nokia to Ericsson a few years ago, and it didn’t take me long to adjust to the new interface. The W800i, as far as I can see, is not much of a move on from the K700i, which in turn wasn’t much different from the T610i. From the main screen, click down on the joy-nozzle, and you’ll be presented with a pretty familiar set of menu options: messaging, connectivity, internet, settings, camera, file management, organiser, contacts etc. Once in each option the menus are logical and straightforward. Alternatively, you can easily set up short-cuts from the main page (some are already provided) so you can move left, right, up, or down, and quickly send text messages or get to your list of contacts.

Calls, are clear and audible, numbers are easy to save to contacts, new contacts are easy to create, messages are easy to send, easy to read and save, and the only issue I can have with the T9 input is that it often wants to default to words I rarely use. Other than that the only fault I can see with this and the K700i is that it can take a while for the phone to sort itself out sometimes if a contact calls you and you have associated an image with that contact. It can be a bit frustrating not being immediately sure whether you’ve answered a call and whether there’s someone at the other end.

One problem I had with the K700 is still around in the W800i, and it does get to me sometimes. When, for example, you send a text message, and you get a “Message sent” message, in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen the word “OK” appears, and you can close the confirmation message by clicking the button underneath “OK”. Which is great, unless you press that button just after the phone decides to automatically close the confirmation message for you, which leaves you wandering off into some submenu somewhere. Nothing wicked usually happens, but it’s tedious nonetheless.

You can probably sync your contacts with your PC, or send and receive emails easily. Who knows, and do most people care? Bluetooth is good if you can get it working, but in any case the W800i can connect to a PC with the supplied USB cable or there’s a slower wireless connection. The long and short of it though is that as a phone, it’s pretty good for speaking to people. Benchmark passed, imo.

Walkman Review

Well, you get a 512Mb card shipped with the W800i, which is enough for about 70-80 decently encoded tracks if you want to leave some space for the odd photo and a few contacts and messages as well. Which, to be fair, is plenty for lots of people, and more than enough for me while I’m trialling the walkman for a couple of weeks. Dispensing with the supplied Disc2Phone CD on the basis that it crashed every time I tried to install the software, I’ve been using Tea Vui Huang’s Mass Storage Synchronizer 1.3 to transfer mp3s from PC to phone. Instructions can be found at Tea’s site, and to be fair it doesn’t take much effort to get tracks onto the phone. Set up a playlist in iTunes, and run the updater. Bingo. Once songs are on the phone, you need to create a few playlists, which fortunately can be done on the go, although unfortunately, doing so is a bit unwieldy.

You need to create a playlist, or go to an existing playlist, click More and choose Add Media, which will take you to your media folder, where your MP3s should be, along with any other sounds you have on the phone (in case you want to add some ringtones to your playlist??). Using the joynozzle, navigate to the artist or folder containing the tunes you want to add, and then select either to Mark or Open the folder. Marking the folder will allow you to add anything in that folder in one go, opening it will take you to subfolders. Once you’ve marked a folder or track, the box next to it is ticked, and you can then go back to other folders and mark those as well. Which is great because it means you don’t have to add individual tracks to your playlist, but a bore because once something is marked, you can’t just open any folders: the open option is replaced by a More option, which then prompts you to either Open the thing you clicked on, or Add everything you’ve already marked, so it’s now three clicks to move from one folder to another.

Once you’ve got tracks to listen to, choosing what to listen to is a breeze. But, there’s a couple of real problems with having a phone that’s trying to be a walkman. The first is that there are a limited number of volume up and volume down steps (16), because that’s what phones have, rather than having 30 or so volume settings like MP3 players typically have. At it’s loudest, it’s easily loud enough for anyone’s needs, so there’s no problem there, but it does mean that sometimes you just find that one setting is too loud, and one is too quiet. Or maybe I’m just eternally fussy… As for sound quality itself, the standard EQ setting is as flat as you’d expect, but you can choose from a few presets or adjust the equaliser yourself, and once adjusted to personal preference it sounds just fine.

I have no idea about battery life, although word on the street is 15 hours is doable in Walkman mode. Not bad considering my iPod strguggle to get past 6 or 7.

So far so good, but here’s where it loses some sheen. Just pop the W800i in your pocket, connect up your headphones (not the supplied ones, which are ok, but as always not as good as they could be) and start listening. Now, without taking the W800i out of your pocket, try to change the volume. Or listen to the next track in the playlist, or pause, or just try to do anything other than carry on listening to the current track. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, but it’s not far from it. The very obvious reason for this, and I don’t know if it’s one that would have occurred to me if I was developing a sophisticated multimedia piece of kit, but I hope it would, is that you’ve been given a music player with a bunch of mobile phone buttons. Buttons that have been honed over the course of a number of years for making it easy to make calls and send messages, but almost competely hopeless when it comes to listening to music. OK, so there’s the magical Walkman button that gives you instant access to the walkman, and there’s the volume up and down on the side of the phone, which would be better if I could operate it without having to look at it (in its favour, it does double as a next track/previous track toggle if you hold down the volume down or up button), and there’s the never-used play/pause button on the other side, but really, given Sony’s ability to make fantastically intuitive control mechanisms, the almost complete lack of one here is something of a mystery.

Still, that memory card is something of a draw, I have to admit. OK, so the off-chav white of the W800i might not suit everyone, and I do feel a tad self-conscious handling it in public, but given the choice between this, and the K750i and having to pay for extended memory, I know which one I’d go for. Seems to me the two phones are almost identical other than color, the camera shutter, and the walkman. Maybe I could even get a (black?) case for this phone…

Camera Review

The lack of a proper Walkman interface is even more of a mystery really given how well they’ve done on the W800i, and on the K750i, to integrate the camera into the device. Gone are the days when you had to press down a special Camera button on the side of the phone, and use the joynozzle to take photos (photos which are accompanied by a hideous electronic version of a camera shutter). These days, you just have to open the shutter on the back of the phone’s case, and you’re in camera mode. Once in Camera mode, hold the phone horizontally, and use the button that’s now on top of the phone to take pictures. Kinda like a camera really. You even get some sort of auto-focus, as well as a blind your mates light, which isn’t quite a flash, but isn’t far off. You even get a cover over the lens, so after a year’s use and abuse it won’t resemble a badly kempt navel. To activate the camera, you can navigate through some menus, or you can just open the cover by flicking a switch on the back of the phone. Genius. And it even turns the camera on if the keypad is locked, which is pretty neat as long as that cover switch doesn’t break. Of course, the only downside to having a cover is that I forget to close it again about 95% of the time, but I’ll get the hang of it just as soon as I unlearn years of crap camera phone behaviour.

The proof of the camera pudding is in the development, as they say, so how does the camera perform? I’ve been out and about, I’ve taken indoor shots, I’ve tried close-ups, and I can quite honestly say that it’s, well, alright I suppose. Good enough to go places I don’t want to take my bulky Canon, and although 2MP and no optical zoom doesn’t quite cut it for those dramatic scenic shots, it should be able to cope with poor lighting, which is something I can’t say about any camera phone I’ve ever used before. As ever, daylight is this camera phone’s friend, and artificial light not so much its friend, but you can still achieve reasonable results without much effort. While not having the optical zoom or the 3MP of the Sharp 903, the W800i makes up for that mainly by not being about a metre long, or awkward and bulky.

To back up my point, and to show that either the camera is average, or my ability is, here are a few shots I’ve taken with it. I haven’t tried particularly hard with these, and with the exception of the faded tree, which is on way too much light, they’re pretty much all just point and click. Except for some planty flowery ones. They might be on macro mode, which works pretty well. I have a feeling that with a little experimentation with light and other settings, you can achieve quite interesting effects with this camera. Pretty impressive really when you consider its one third of a whole.

(Note that clicking on the thumbs will display some largeish images. Those with higher monitor resolutions will get the most out of these…)

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