The idea of a cell phone playing digital music isn’t new; in fact, it’s been almost five years since I saw my first MP3 player in a cell phone. Today, every major cell phone maker has the capability in at least a handful of their offering. So what makes the W800i different? When Sony lends the iconic Walkman brand to Sony Ericsson, you have to take a look.
Sweet Music
Does the W800i deserve the Walkman brand? Audio sounds surprisingly good and with the five band equalizer you can tweak the settings to meet your taste. You’ll even find Mega Bass, another throwback to the Walkman brand, to really make your music thump. Overall, I was impressed with the audio quality of the W800i.
The W800i supports MP3 and AAC formatted music, but nothing else. There’s no support for any protected music purchased from online stores. For some that’s a deal breaker, but it’s perfectly fine for me and my MP3 only collection.
Navigating the music menus is simple enough. Everything is neatly organized and accessible with a five-way navigation stick. Music is indexed by artist or a full list of tracks, but no genre or album category. While it’s not as thoroughly indexed as most MP3 players, I tend to search my collection by artist anyway, so it didn’t bother me.
With the W800i you’ll get a 512 MB Memory Stick Duo card cable of storing around 130 songs depending on the bit rate. You get a quality pair of headphones and handsfree kit that lets you plug in your own headphones without losing the microphone to answer those incoming calls.
The included Disc2Phone application does nothing beyond ripping from a CD or transcoding to lower bit rates during transfer. There’s no library management capability, play lists or anything that makes is particularly useful in the digital music world. I found simply dragging and dropping albums more functional and significantly faster. You’ll just have to make sure your music is organized by Artist then Album in the MP3 folder on the Memory Stick Duo for the W800i to read it properly.
And Everything Else
As a phone, the W800i stays true to the Sony Ericsson interface. There’s a 2.0 megapixel camera with a user interface from Sony’s digital camera lineup. You’ll even get a bright illumination lamp for low light shooting. There’s an FM tuner too and, of course, Bluetooth.
My biggest complaint is the $500 price tag. There’s no service provider, so the phones completely unlocked, but you don’t get any service subsidy in return. That makes the W800i pretty pricey for what you get. Without support for the 850 MHz spectrum, Cingular users in some regions might find service not quite up to par. Overall, I’d rate my experience with the W800i very positive. It’s extremely pocket friendly and has features burn. But the price lands it firmly in the more robust and flexible smartphone territory.
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