As I said on my previous posting, Sony Ericsson (SE) marketing team has kindly sent me a Walkman phone, i.e. W810i. Now, I would like to give my first impression after using the phone for a couple of days.

There are actually two variants of W810, i.e. W810i, is for Americas, APAC and EMEA market and W810c is for Mainland China. I am going to concentrate on SE W810i only. The functionalities of both models are more or less the same though. The full technical specification of W810 is available on Sony Ericsson web site.

Sony Ericsson W810i

Phone

W810i is a GSM quad band phone. It means you can use it almost anywhere in the world. However, it is not a 3G phone. For local connectivity, W810i supports Bluetooth and Infrared.

The phone design is robust and attractive. It is small and light. That’s why it is very convenient to carry or put into our pocket. The latest models, W610i and W880i, which are coming soon, will have even slimmer design.

Camera

As many other phones these days, W810i has built-in 2 MPix camera with flash and auto focus support. It has a dedicated camera key on the right side of the phone to capture picture. So, if you rotate the phone 90 degrees counterclockwise, the key will be on the top. We can capture pictures just like they way we used to do it on standard camera. The picture quality taken from the camera is surprisingly good.

A picture taken from Sony Ericsson W810i

Audio

Now it’s time to discuss the most interesting part, audio. W810i supports the most popular music format, MP3, as well as other formats, such as AAC and M4A. The audio quality is pretty good although not the best in the class.

The phone comes with 20 MB internal memory and is expandable with Memory Stick Pro Duo. The package is bundled with 512 MB Memory Stick Pro Duo, which should hold around 100 songs in MP3 format. If you want more, you can buy 1 GB or 2 GB memory card.

Controlling music player is very convenient using dedicated music keys. Walkman key is used to switch between phone and music functionalities. There is Play/Pause key on the left side of the phone and volume key on the right side. Additionally, we have navigation keys integrated with the joystick to jump to previous or next track as well as to rewind or fast forward the current song.

Music Synchronization

How do we transfer music files to the phone? There several ways to synchronize music files from PC to W810i, i.e.:

  • Windows Media Player. When you connect W810 to your PC via USB cable, you can select File transfer mode and use Windows Media Player for synchronization.
  • Disc2Phone. It is an application as part of Sony Ericsson PC Suite. It allows us to transfer music files from our PC to the phone.
  • iTunes. iTunes is not officially supported by Sony Ericsson. However, there are some third party applications that allows us to synchronize W810i to iTunes. One of them is iTunes Agent.

Unfortunately USB connection between phone and the PC is relatively slow. Transferring 100 MB takes about 15 minutes. You can estimate how long it will take to transfer songs to 1 GB memory card.

Summary

As summary, W810 is a good basic phone with excellent music player.

What I like about W810i

  • Robust and attractive design.
  • Small and light.
  • Dedicated music keys to play, pause, rewind, fast forward and change volume.
  • Easy synchronization to PC via Windows Media Player support or Disc2Phone.

What I don’t like about W810

  • No 3.5 mm port on the phone. There is an extension cable to connect to 3.5 mm headset, but it would be nice if the port is integrated into the phone.
  • Non-standard USB port connection. We cannot use standard USB cable to connect phone to the PC.
  • Slow music transfer from PC to the phone. Having high-speed USB connection would be very nice.
  • No album art in the Music Player.