Phone home with the W800i... (Sony Ericsson W800i)

Member Name: dlb74

Product:	Sony Ericsson W800i
Date:	17/07/06 (408 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: MP3 player, 2.0 Mega pixel camera, Full colour screen, Loud Speaker

Disadvantages: The phone is prone to crashing on occasion

Where do I start when reviewing the Sony Ericsson W800i? Well it's quite a slick, feature packed phone but is certainly not without it's faults.

Firstly, let me tell you about some of the advantages of the phone itself. It features an MP3 player which is pretty good - and the software that comes with the phone (I'll get to that a little later!) does, to be fair, let you get a pretty reasonable amount of music onto the phone - depending of course on how much of the phone's memory is already taken up with photos etc.

Which brings me onto the digital camera on the phone. It's a very reasonable 2.0 Mega Pixel camera which can take some very good quality snaps when you consider that they have come from a mobile phone. The phone has a light for when you need to take photos in darker environments - which can be very useful. There are also many different modes in which you can take a photograph - ranging from Panoramic shots which with a bit of practice and a very steady hand, you can make up one large panoramic shots from up to three photographs to the burst mode - which takes four photos in very quick succession.

Of course, the results from this phone are probably inferior to those achieved through a dedicated digital camera and one such disadvantage is that there is a slight delay when taking a picture - so don't move the phone until you get a message on the screen saying it's saving your picture otherwise you will most likely get nothing but blurred photos!

The software that comes with the phone has it's pros and cons. The general file managing software does the job as well as could be expected and allows you to move files to and from your phone and PC with relative ease. The MP3 software Disc2Phone can be an entirely different kettle of fish altogether. It's sometimes infuriating just trying to put music across from CD's or your PC if for example it's a compilation album. It's not uncommon in such circumstances for the software to seperate tracks from different artists and put them into seperate files. However, this can sometimes be remedied without pulling all of your hair out first... just!

I personally have had quite a few problems with this phone since I bought it on a contract with Orange last September. I think I'm on my fifth handset as the first few phones I had were prone to crashing from time-to-time. Even my current handset can stop working - giving me nothing but a white screen before resetting itself. Not exactly what you would expect from a cutting-edge company such as Sony Ericsson. I think the problem nowadays is that the mobile phone industry changes so quickly that companies are being forced to make their handsets as feature-packed as humany possible - and maybe don't get the chance to test everything fully. Hence maybe that's why I have found the W800i to be fairly bug-ridden on occasion.

That said - the thing I have so far failed to mention about this hand-set is the sound quality of phone calls that are made and received! Afterall, I'm sure some people still buy mobile phones to use as a phone and not an MP3 player or camera!!! The sound quality of calls is very good quality - whether they're through the phone's ear-piece itself or through the hands free kit headphones. So at least on this most basic of levels, I cannot fault the phone.

To summarise, the W800i is by no means a shoddy phone in it's own right. When it works well, it tends to work very well... just don't be surprised if it plays up from time to time.

Summary: This is a good but not a perfect mobile phone.

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