Sony Ericsson W800i Review

The first mobile phone to bare the famous Walkman branding from Sony Ericsson - the much anticipated W800i.

When we received our first batch, there was much excitement in the office ! What was it going to be like ? Does it live up to all the hype ? When you deal in mobile phones all day everyday, you do get disappointed too many times when things don't deliver or things don't appear quite as they first seem. However the W800i didn't fit into that category...

Sony Ericsson have gone to great lengths to distinguish the W800i from lesser models & they appear to have done the trick. The presentation of the phone was great. It comes in a see-through plastic 'box' with everything but the phone hidden within the clever packaging..Nice touch.

After hurriedly whisking the phone from the box we pretty much all agreed that the orange & white colouring didn't detract in any way...in fact it looked pretty cool - Not formal like the similar K750i

The W800i comes with a 512Mb memory stick and 34Mb of memory within the phone itself - roughly about enough to store 200 songs dependant on the format. Although you can buy more memory if you wish as the Pro Duo memory sticks currently go up to 2Gb !

Software and data cables come in the box, so you can pretty much get going straight away. We didn't encounter any hitches getting our music on the phone, although it has to be said that the menu functions sometimes weren't always that clear. One important message for anyone with WMA files though, forget it ! They're not supported so don't even bother trying...

As we are all well aware, the W800i / K750i / D750i (T-Mobile version) are all very closely related & thus the menus are pretty similar, although not identical. The W800i differs through it's Walkman branded menu systems and features such as the 'play-list' and 'what's on next' etc.

With going on about the music virtues of the W800i, its easy to forget that it also has a 2.0 megapixel digital camera too. Far better than most mobile phones on the market at the moment. Picture quality is superb, as is the video record/play option. It's real easy getting your images onto your PC, in fact it couldn't be any easier - simply 'drag-and-drop' and that's about as hard as it gets...pretty nifty ! The camera is on the reverse of the phone as in previous models and has it's own shutter cover for protection. Flash, zoom etc are all as standard.