Sony Ericsson W880i reviews from across the Web have been almost universally glowing.
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The W880i is a super-thin Walkman phone from Sony Ericsson that comes packed full of features, and it’s the combination of what it packs with how it looks that has so many W880i reviews singing its praises.
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Put simply, the W880i is a stunning looking designer phone from Sony Ericsson that does everything well, packs in more connectivity than most designer phones, and comes with musical abilities that would shame an iPod.
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The first thing you notice about the W880i is just how thin it is.
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At just 9.4mm, it’s almost credit card thin (though still nearly twice the thickness of Samsung’s extraordinary Ultra 5.9).
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Despite its super-thin features, though, Sony Ericsson have managed to cram all manner of goodies into the W880i.
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Two megapixel camera, 1GB of storage, Sony Ericsson’s excellent Walkman music player (now coming as version 2.0), plus full 3G connectivity.
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Add to this a crystal clear 262,000 colour 1.8″ TFT display and killer looks, and you have a designer mobile phone that really looks the part.
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The Sony Ericsson W880i is a standard candy bar design with a set of navigation and music keys below its screen, a small numeric keypad beneath that, and its camera on the reverse. As you can see form the pics, it looks stunning, and its even better in real life. It really has a sense of quality about it.
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Unfortunately, the keys themselves can be difficult to use as they’re tiny. If you’re blessed with pencil-thin fingers, you won’t have problem, but the for the fat-fingered amongst us, you’re in trouble! Best to test the phone out at a shop before buying it to make sure you acn actually use it!
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The W880i’s camera is offers 2 megapixels, which is pretty much average for this class of phone. Despite it not being a Cybershot phone, like some of Sony Ericsson’s other models, and so not coming with all the bells and whistles such as autofocus and adjustable ISO settings, it still gives good quality pics.
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Indeed, despite its lack of additional features, the W880i’s camera is still one of the better ones for a mobile phone, which is to be expected, as Sony Ericsson is renowned for making the best camera phones on the market. Taking shots is quick and easy, which is a welcome relief if you’ve ever used a camera phone that seems to take an hour between pressing the camera button and the phone’s camera actually taking the shot.
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You can also adjust white balance, and can take photos using a variety of different settings, including night mode, panorama and burst-mode, which takes a series of photos in quick succession.
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You can see some examples of the W880i’s camera below (courtesy of GSMArena).
Of course, the main feature of the W880i is its musical abilities – it is a Walkman phone, after all. The first thing to note is the amount of different music encoding formats the W880i supports. You can play music encoded in MP3, AAC, AAC+, E-AAC+, WAV, WMA, M4A and MIDI file formats.
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The quality of the music is first rate, as you’d expect of a Walkman phone, although the sound from the external loudspeaker is diappointing – you can hardly hear any bass, despite the W880i coming with Sony Ericsson’s own MegaBass equalizer setting. This is due to the size of the phone, though, and so is a problem for all similar slim phones.
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Fortunately, the sound of the loudspeaker can easily be compensated for, either by plugging headphones into the W880i, using Bluetooth to wirelessly stream music to a Bluetooth adaptor (such as an earpiece, Bluetooth speakers, Sony Ericsson’s Music Bluetooth Receiver MBR-100 for streaming your tunes to your car steroe, or a Bluetooth-equipped Hi-Fi.
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Sony Ericsson have updated the Walkman interface, too, making it even better than it was before (see screenshot, left). There’s a dedicated music button that takes you straight to the interface, so there’s no faffing about if you absolutely have to listen to a tune then and there, and the interface provides easy access to the phone’s musical features.
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As you’d expect, you can create playlists, set the phone to play tunes in shuffle or repeat mode, and get it to display cover art or visualisations. You can also play around with equalizer settings, and even send the tune to GraceNote using a feature called TrackID, which listens to the tune you’re currently playing, sends it to GraceNote, and then displays the name of the track.
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In order to listen to your tunes, the W880i supports Memory Stick Micro cards (M2) for storage, and the W880i comes with a 1GB M2 card as standard, which is a nice touch. You can also use the M2 storage card to store files as well, and so use the W880i as a rather expensive but good-looking USB stick!
As the W880i is a full 3G phone, you’d expect it to have a video player and recorder, and it doesn’t disappoint. You can use the tiny video recorder to make video calls of yourself using a variety of useful options, including the ability to see yourself as the camera sees you, or as an inverted reflection of yourself. This latter mode reflects how you see yourself in a mirror, and so apparently is much more natural.
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Seeing the person on the other end of the video call is also adustable, with different settings for smoothness or higher resolution of picture, and also a night feature.
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As I said, the W880i is a 3G phone, and also offers tri-badn GSM (supporting GSM 900/1800/1900). Sadly, it’s not quad-band, so you can’t use it everywhere in the world, and it’s only single-band 3G (supporting UMTS 2100), so you can’t use its 3G features in the US, which is a shame.
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It also comes with Bluetooth 2.0, plus support for Bluetooth A2DP streaming, PictBridge for transferring pictures to other PictBridge-enabled devices (such as cameras and printers), and USB for easy connection to a PC.
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Apart from making phone calls, you can use all this connectivity to browse the Web with a Web browser, read RSS news feeds, send and receive email, chat using Instant Messaging, and even indulge in a spot of mob-blogging – the W880i comes with Picture Blogging, which lets you upload your pictures to your blog at the touch of a button.
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So there you have it – the Sony Ericsson W880i. Apparently, it’s been flying off the shelves, which isn’t a surprise given the way it looks and the qualit of its features. If you want a designer phone tha tplays music exceptionally well and comes with full 3G video calling, and can put up with its tiny keypad, you could do worse than checking out the W880i.