Sony Ericsson W800i
Music phone, meet walkman phone
It's the first phone to get the official Walkman branding. Music cell phones have been around awhile but they've never been able to deeply replace a good portable digital audio player because of a handful of limitations. Battery life, storage capacity and weak audio quality keep media playing phones a forgettable curiosity.
The W800i shows us that DAP phones are just starting to come into their own, but they're not quite there yet as Sony Ericsson makes a wonderful music machine but a sub-par phone for North Americans. 2006 could really be a breakthrough year as we're seeing some quality efforts crop up from every manufacturer.
Sony Ericsson seeks to address many of the limitations of the music phone with their W800i. The phone itself is a candybar style cell phone based on the design of the older K750i, but this one gets the new Walkman logo and funky orange coloring of the Walkman MP3 player. Despite its slick looking exterior, this phone has some top shelf engineering inside.
Let's start with the phone itself: a tri-band GSM/GPRS 900/1800/1900 MHz. It has a 2 mega pixel camera that snaps pics that look about as good as dedicated digital camera could about five years ago. It has a screen that looks as good as anything in the industry today, a 176x220 pixel resolution and 262K color depth. But this phone's real strength is in its music playback. Featuring a headphone jack you can plug into the bottom in a sort of dongle adaptor that lets you plug in any conventional headphones that will likely be an improvement to the included set Sony gives you. You can jam 'til a call comes in and the music automatically pauses for you, then you can resume at the press of a button. The one button playback/pause feature gives the player easy operation, allowing the user to pause, stop, resume, playback, go forward, etc., at a push of a button. It makes this a superior music player to Motorola's Rokr that requires you fumble around with menu systems to perform these basic operations.
Storage is no problem with built-in 35Megs of storage and a 512 Memory Stick Duo included, which you can upgrade to one of those 1 or 2 Gig monsters if you so choose. It should be noted that the W600i, the little sister to the W800i, doesn't allow the memory upgrade, leaving you stuck with only 256 Megs. The storage is quite flexible and Sony Ericsson imposes no song limitation on their phone, another vast improvement over the Rokr's 100 title limit. For the odd time you're interested in listening to some local radio there is even built in FM reception, a holdover feature from the new Walkman Mp3 players but not exactly a strong feature to brag about. What about the Achilles heel of the mobile handsets, battery life? This one performs admirably at 450 minutes off a full charge -- that's 7.5 hours of rocking out.
Verdict
This is a top notch music phone, as good as an iPod shuffle for Mp3 playback and a good quality camera to boot. The biggest gripe about this phone is quite frankly the phone. 900 MHz GSM is a problem for North America, where few to no carriers use that frequency. Inclusion of 850MHz would have been nice as that seems to be the broad standard being used on this side of the ocean. You still have 1900 but that's just one frequency, the 850 band is widely considered the most stable and far superior.
And as for MP3 playback, Sony, Microsoft and Apple are all playing games with their DRM compatibility. Whatever the cause, Sony is in the dark with no DRM support from Apple's iTunes or Microsoft's DRM. PlaysForSure, Microsoft's DRM 10 compatibility would have been a real treat with this phone. The ability to take advantage of an online music source and download straight to your phone is one of those high end features we'll have to wait for in North America.