Orange & Cream, sound yummy! Oh wait it's a phone (Sony Ericsson W800i)

Member Name: Nickycool

Product:	Sony Ericsson W800i
Date:	22/01/07 (263 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Battery life, the camera, easy to use

Disadvantages: Sound quality, discontinued phone

Sony Ericsson W800I

Yep, it’s another phone review. I got given this at work and even though this model is way older than my Samsung Z400, I was just hoping the battery life on this phone is much better than that.
As this is a discontinued phone not many places still stock it and the only place that you might find it is Ebay or another auction sites.

Overview of the phone

Design: A candybar design as they call it in the business but to us normal people, it’s just a basic phone that doesn’t flip, slide or twist. It’s a cream colour with an orange trim. When it came out, it was very popular just because the colours were so different to other phones. The keys light up orange in the dark and are quite small but big enough for me. It’s light to hold and fit in the pocket quite well despite its shape.

Features

It was one of the first Walkman phones on the market. It was specially design to play music. It’s a 2-megapixel camera and has a joystick for easy navigation. It has bluetooth, radio, wap, calendar etc. It has an internal memory of 38MB* and didn’t come with memory card.
* Internal memory can vary on different networks.

A more detailed look at the phone

This phone is a Tri-Band phone, which means you can use it nearly anywhere in the world except in places where you need a Quad-Band phone.

The screen on the phone displays everything nicely and though, the text could be slightly larger.

This phone is a 2-megapixel camera. Back in the day when this phone came out, that was something. It has 4x digital zoom and also a phone light for when you are in dark places. The quality is great and transfers well onto the PC. The camera features on this phone are nearly exactly the same though the new version W850I only has a 2.5x digital zoom.
Also a great thing about the camera is that it’s protected but a lens cap but it can get annoying if you want an instant photo of something, remember to take off the lens or it won’t do anything. Though, it does say on the screen open the lens cover so you’re not taking loads of black pictures.
A quick way of getting the camera is second button on the right hand side of the phone.
The video quality is good as well but does have limitations. It pixelates quite a bit when you’re in places that are that bright and tends to have blue little dots (pixels) on the screen when you move it around.

The phonebook is great on this as it has a lot of options for you to save about your contacts.
Of course, the phone number and name but also email, website, address, birthday, a picture even a personalised ringtone so it gives me a chance to ignore the boyfriend when I’m not speaking to him.

The MP3 player is nice feature but I don’t really know what everyone was raving about when this came out. Through the headphones, it’s brilliant quality just wish the sound quality was that good through the speaker on the phone. To get the MP3 player on, just push the Walkman button and it’s straight on. The software that you get called Disc-to-Phone is to transform your music off a CD into MP3s and put it onto the phone. To be honest, use other software to convert your tracks and then just transfer it over to the phone.

The only problem is that the phone memory can only hold about 6 songs, which means if you didn’t get a memory card, you’ll have to buy one. Also Sony Ericsson memory card seems to be the most expensive on the phone market as they use their own brand. This phone takes Memory Stick Duo, which also works in a PSP. The memory slot is on the left-hand side at the bottom of the phone.

The radio feature is brilliant on this phone. It stores all the radio stations that you have pick up. You can only use the radio when the headphones are plugged in, as they are the aerial to pick up the FM radio stations. A quick button to get to the radio is on the left-hand side of the phone.
With both Walkman and the radio features, you can use your phone while listen to the music. So you text to your heart content while you listen to your fav tunes.

Ringtones and messages tones are easy to choose once you know that in settings you have to use the joystick to go left to get them. Though the sound quality isn’t that great, the loudness of the phone is. I was downstairs and I could hear my phone ringing upstairs. Now that’s what I call great!

Text messaging is straightforward. You’ve got your predictive text, normal text and numbers. I’m getting used to texting on SE because I’ve had Samsung's for the past couple of years. Like on most Sony Ericsson phones, you can’t tell how many texts you have in your inbox or outbox.
You can choose any ringtone or message tone for your text messages.
Sending pictures message is easy too. Just select a picture that’s not too big in file size (if the file is too big, the network doesn’t be able to send it) and send it! To send an email on this phone, you have to do it through the picture messaging and then when you have to type in the phone number, just type an email address instead. If your picture messages aren’t sending, check your settings are correct or go to your nearest network provider to see if it’s enable your account.

There’s also flight mode, which means basically you can use it on an aeroplane.
Bluetooth works well for sending and receiving pictures and music but also on the headsets as well. As bluetooth headsets are universal, my Samsung one works perfectly well with this phone.

Now when comes to the Joystick. Highly annoying. Maybe because I’m not used to it but I know that one of the reasons that this phone and other SE come back for repair at work. I remember that a Sony Ericsson rep told me to avoid using the joystick too much, you can use the keypad. The numbers on the keypad correspond to the menu.
So it goes
1 – Playnow
2 - Internet Services
3 – Entertainment
4 – Camera
5 – Messages
6 – Walkman
7 - File manager
8 – Contacts
9 – Radio
* - calls
0 – Organizer
# - Settings

There are 2 games on the phone.
Puzzle Slider – Where you try and get the picture back in the right order
QuadraPop – Tetris with a difference. Music notes.

Other features on the phone are the calendar, alarm, notes, tasks, calculator, timer, file manager and Stopwatch.

In the box, I got all the software, headphones but also a pair of battery run the speakers by JBL and all the leads to go with it. It’s like having a little mini hi-fi in your bedroom.

So we come onto the battery life. This is the most important thing for me as this is the reason why I dumped my Z400 for this phone. In hope, that the battery life is better. Well, it’s looking good. 3 days without charging it, which is good enough for me. The website says 9 hours of talk time and 400 hours, which is actually better than their newer version, the W850i.
You can also charge it with the USB cable through the PC, which is brilliant for me, as I don’t have that many sockets spare.

A handy thing on this phone that when you press the down key for the volume just once, it displays relevant information about the phone. The date, what profile its on, the model of the phone, your phone number, the free memory on the phone and how much battery life you have left.

So what do I think of this phone so far?

It’s great. I love it. Slightly disappointed about the sound quality of the speaker on the phone but that’s only because my boyfriend has the W850I! Well technically that my phone too but he’s using it. If you can find this on Ebay cheap than go for it, it’s lovely phone that takes great pictures.

Summary: a lovely phone that takes great pictures

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