Sony Ericsson w810i review

Even though I’ve bought W810i some 6-7months ago, and didn’t really think about writing a review for it, recent email changed that opinion. Here’s some part of the first email:

“I’m reaching out to you on behalf of Sony Ericsson and M80 regarding the W810i Sony Ericsson Walkman phone. Since you blogged about Walkman, I thought that you might be interested in posting the press release or an in-depth product review of the phone on your blog? You seem like a reputable influencer, so I think you’d be a big help to us. For your review, I would be happy to send you a W810i model to check out, or if you already have the phone, a set of external speakers as well as a Walkman T-shirt. Or maybe all three?”

Now, the good stuff ;)

Sony Ericsson technical specs:

General Network: GSM 850 / GSM 900 / GSM 1800 / GSM 1900
Announced 2006, 1Q
Status: Available
Size Dimensions : 100 x 46 x 19.5 mm
Weight : 99 g
Display Type : TFT, 256K colors
Size: 176 x 220 pixels, 28 x 35 mm
– Wallpapers, screensavers
Ringtones Type : Polyphonic (40 channels), MP3
Customization Composer, download, order now
Vibration : Yes
Memory Phonebook 1000 x 24 fields, Photo call
Call records : 30 received, dialed and missed calls
Card slot Memory Stick Duo Pro (up to 2GB), 512 MB card included
– 20 MB shared memory
Data GPRS Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 – 48 kbps
HSCSD : Yes
EDGE : Class 10, 236.8 kbps
3G : No
WLAN: No
Bluetooth: Yes, v2.0
Infrared port: Yes
USB: Yes, v2.0
Features Messaging: SMS, MMS, Email, Instant Messaging
Browser: WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML (NetFront)
Games : Yes + downloadable, special offer
Colors : Satin Black, Fusion White
Camera: 2 MP, 1632×1224 pixels, autofocus, video, flash
– MP3/AAC/MPEG4 player
– Video player
– Java
– T9
– FM radio with RDS
– Image viewer
– Picture editor
– Organiser
– Voice memo
– SyncML
– Built-in handsfree
Battery Standard battery, Li-Ion
Stand-by Up to 350 h
Talk time Up to 8 h

Note: In China W810i is named W810c

W810 vs iPod

I was actually thinking of buying an iPod, I thought it over and w810 Walkman series won. This was my way of thinking about it all. With W810 I can talk, SMS, surf the net, take high quality pictures/videos, and listen to my music.

With iPod, all I can do is play games, listen to music, view pictures/videos, and be cool? To make one thing clear, in my opinion (and many others said the same thing) W810i looks amazing, and definitely cool. I still have a “classic” Sony Walkman laying around somewhere, and it still works, and trust me, it went through hell and back with me. So I thought Phone + Walkman wont be a bad decision.

Before that, I was emulating “walkman” on my K750 by installing W800 software, but it was too much for it. Phone would often crash and freeze, in the end it was like you installed BMW engine into your VW Rabbit :)

Start Phone

First thing you’ll notice when you turn on your phone is the dialog you see below:

You have an option to Start phone or Music only. Main difference between “Start phone” and “Music only” is great, “Music only” starts walkman without phone, battery lasts longer, and main advantage is that this way you can use it in airplanes, hospitals and such.

Durability

W810 is an awesome peace of hardware, not even as I moved around the block from the store I bought it in I drop it, fell on the ground, picked it up, hard rock solid did not even leave a mark on it.

To this date, I’ve dropped it so many times, that I stopped counting a long time ago. As you can see in the pictures, phone survived everything without a single mark.

What I also like about it’s casing is the way SIM card is packed. It’s all incredibly simple but yet very powerful and easy/hard to open. Only thing I don’t like about its outside design is that the display is made of a plastic that likes to have your fingerprints on it. So if you hate seeing your fingerprints on your display you’ll spend a lot of time rubbing your display with your shirt :)

Walkman

Walkman is done the way any regular Sony mp3 player would be done, and to the point you can also tweak your equalizer.

What’s even better is that, you can easily access by pressing the “W button”, can easily stop playing music by pressing a single “Play/Pause” button, which is on phones side. Also not to forget, for the first time you’ll be able to experience “multitasking” with your cell phone. While listening to your music, you can easily do all you’re doing regularly. (SMS, internet, games, camera)

In case you’re listening to your music and your phone rings, walkman will pause song you’re on and ring your regular ringtone, once you’re done with the call, walkman will continue the song where it paused it. Same goes with video camera, it’ll pause, once you’re done “filming” it’ll continue where it stopped. Walkman can also be used for playing your videos, and is better then regular video viewer. With walkman you can view your video in a full screen mode with is more then excellent.

Fullscreen mode is also enabled when viewing your pictures, fullscreen is so great that it goes to the point, that sometimes you wish you could handle your phone while viewing/controlling it horizontally.

With your phone you get Sony Ericsson headphones with it. Which may seem weird when you first see them. They’ll enter your ear completely, now when you play your walkman, it’ll change your world completely. It changed my world, I even used to plug them into my computer to listen to my music.

These are the best headphones ever. Music just sounds the way you have never experienced it before. Listening to the music via your phone has just got a new meaning and is also a new definition of fun.

Talking about headphones, there’s a great new addition to it. They come out of two pieces, one that connects to your phone, and leads to a 3.5 jack extension … um what does that mean? That means that if you’re going to someones party, host doesn’t have music, you’re literally a walking jukebox. You can connect you phone/walkman with their speakers and play your own music :)

However there’s a little glitch. To transfer music from your computer to your phone, you’ll use Sony Ericsson’s “disc2phone“, you’ll transfer your music with via USB cable you got with your phone. Then what is it? What’s wrong with “disc2phone”?

Nothing, except that it’s made for Windows XP and Windows 2000. Disc2phone is not compatible with other Windows versions, what’s even worse it’s not compatible with most multimedia oriented made computer … Mac. Now, me being the Linux user, this hit me hard. I tried emulating disc2phone over CrossOver Office, wine, etc … nothing worked.

Cant you use your memory card and add music to your phone without disc2phone?
Yes. But I wouldn’t recommend it. This will definitely lead to massive amounts of anger.

I even contacted Sony Ericsson regarding this problem, and they said they don’t plan on releasing disc2phone under Linux. So what I suggest is to have a VMware or separate “box” with Windows XP/2000 on it. This is just I guess their policy or similiar, since I saw some of their mp3 walkmans had to use similar (if not the same) software.

Disc2phone as itself, is pretty ok program.
Plus (+): Option is that you can change songs bit rate.
Minus (-): Transferring big number of media can take awhile.

This in my opinion is the greatest minus.