W800 - 'Walkman' Phone (Sony Ericsson W800i)

Member Name: NCF355

Product:	Sony Ericsson W800i
Date:	20/11/05 (3281 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: 2MP Camera, Nice interface, FM Radio, Walkman Feature

Disadvantages: Walkman feature

Well,

having read the other review on here I can only say I'm green with envy that this guy managed to get a W800i that works.

Let me just say that with all the rest of the features (Phone, Bluetooth, FM Radio, Camera, Etc) I am more than happy.

But the phones main selling point is the Walkman fucntion, which looking at the design of the phone and the interface is in principal an excellent idea.

However, it appears to be in practice it falls apart.

I believe I have fallen victim to being an early adopter and hence ended up suffering a phone that has not been properly tested prior to release - this, for a company of Sony's quality is quite simply not good enough.

Examples:

1) Loaded the enclosed disc 2 phone software which looked OK and had a nice, simple interface -

Left window - Windows explorer type thing to view all drives on PC

Middle window - this is where you place files to transfer

Right window - Shows what has been transferred to phone


So, I transferred two albums and they showed up on the right as being on the phone (recognised as an 'F' drive removable disk for the Duo card) - I could even play the tracks from this drive through to the PC.

Disconnected the phone and went in to the Walkman function - two albums show up with artist name, then album name, then drill into tracks - at this point only 3 of the tracks (should have been 12) are shown, despite them all having shown as transferred on disc 2 phone.

The 2nd album was worse - when I drilled down from the album title it came up with an error message stating no tracks were available and I should use the disc 2 phone software to transfer (which of course I had done).

2) Formatted the memory card and tried again - this time 2 full albums loaded fine and quite happily played for 10 minutes or so, but then one track locked up and I could get out of it - even after removing the batter for 3 - 4 minutes and re inserting, as soon as I went to the WM function I was stuck on the same track again.

I believe that the it is the phone software that is at fault here and not the disc 2 phone software - it just doesnt seem to have been tested to any degree prior to release and seems to give false info back to disc 2 phone.

I did try just using file manager to copy tracks, but this gave the same problems and was also sooooooooooo slow.

I am software tester by profession and can just see holes all over this walkman part of the software, so I am giving the phone 3 stars for its general phone etc ability, but knocking the 2 stars for the walkman function which is a disaster.

Please do not think this is just me, or a one off, look at the Expansys UK forums - there are lots of people with the same issues.

I would say that this phone should only be considered after about Feb/March 06' when Sony have had chance to release firmware upgrades that sort out this mess.

Summary: Cool in prinicipal, poor pre release testing spoils it

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