Sony Ericsson W880i review

The resurgence of Sony Ericsson's Walkman brand began with the superb W800i music phone and since then, several new Walkman music phones have cropped up.

The W880i is the successor to the W810i and is a stylish phone with a powerful built-in music player.

The W880i is the slimmest phone we have ever seen. It's only 9mm thick, which makes it 5mm thinner than Motorola's RAZR. It also has an unusual keypad and instead of flat buttons, the W880i has raised metal ridges. This leaves plenty of room between each key and makes it far harder for clumsy fingers to mistype. Like Sony Ericsson's K800i, the W880i has a fantastic screen. It's bright with lovely vibrant colours and a high 240 x 320 pixel resolution, so text is clear.

The W880i works well as a music player. The phone comes with the simple Disc2Phone application, which makes getting tunes onto the phone a cinch. You can encode directly from CD into the phone's MP3 format, or drag-and-drop WAV or WMA files into the software to encode to compatible MP3. When encoding from CD, the software automatically downloads track names from the internet. The phone's Walkman application is also simple to use and lets you organise your tracks by artist, album or track, as well as create playlists. There's room for around 250 high-quality songs on the supplied memory card.

The phone is shipped with a pair of noise-blocking headphones. These sit right in your ear and not only block outside noise, but also stop your music leaking out and annoying other people. Although overly bright at the phone's default settings, they are fine after some fiddling with the five-channel graphic equalizer. Call quality isn't brilliant though, and some callers complained of a slightly muffled and robotic voice quality.

Although the music functions are excellent, the W880i has a disappointing camera. Unlike the W810i, there is no LED flash for night shots and the lens is fixed focus rather than autofocus. Images have plenty of colour saturation and contrast, but are blurry.

Sony Ericsson W880i user guides, FAQs and downloads at Know Your Mobile

Author: Chris Finnamore