Sony Ericsson W880i

Photo gallery: Sony Ericsson W880i

Design
Available in two colour variations, black with dark orange or brushed silver with black, Sony Ericsson's W880i is a stunner. With an ultra-thin design making it only 9.4mm thick, it stealthily slides into your pocket with almost no bulge resulting. Laying flat the W880i has a footprint of 46.5mm by 103mm, with a rubberised back preventing it from skidding around if thrown down on a table. Tipping the scales at only 80 grams, it feels almost toy-like.

The W880i has a compact but sharp screen capable of showing 262K colours and 240x320 pixels. Like many petite phones, such as the Samsung X830, the W880i's biggest drawback is its keypad. Sony Ericsson has made the W880i's keys as tiny slivers, which lack space between them vertically; large fingered people will have problems distinguishing the buttons. Sony Ericsson has abandoned its usual joystick in favour of a four-way nav key that, like the rest of the keypad, is fiddly and prone to accidental presses, mainly due to the closeness of the directional keys to the centre selection button. If your fingers are small, though, you shouldn't have a problem with navigation or typing text messages -- Sony Ericsson's interface remains one of the easiest to use.

Flip the W880i over and you'll find a 2-megapixel camera on the back, but without a flash of any kind. Shortcuts on the side of the W880i are for launching the camera, opening the Walkman music application and adjusting the volume. The proprietary charging and connection port is moved from its usual bottom placement of the phone to the side, directly above the hot-swappable Memory Stick Micro (M2) card slot.

Although svelte, Samsung's Ultra Edition 6.9 (X820) remains the skinniest phone we've seen, although it is wider and longer than the W880i.

Features
As with all Walkman-branded phones (sold in Australia at least), the W880i is bundled with a 1GB memory card -- room for about 250 MP3 or AAC songs. With the focus of this mobile being music, Sony Ericsson throws in an excellent pair of headphones, which have rubberised tips that fit snugly in your ears and block out some ambient noise. Our test W880i also came pre-loaded with two music-related applications in the main menu: the PlayNow music purchasing service and TrackID. PlayNow wasn't configured to work with our 3 SIM -- presumably because 3 offers its own music download service through Planet 3 -- but if you've ever played Name That Track at trivia, TrackID is the ultimate cheating tool. Once launched, TrackID records a 15-second sample through its microphone and, providing the music source is loud enough, sends it to be identified by a music recognition server and you'll receive an SMS response with the name of the artist, track and album (if it's well known and in its database) in a jiffy.

In addition to the main 2-megapixel camera, there's a low-res secondary camera on the front for video calling. As such the W880i supports 3G (UMTS 2100MHz) networks, but can't download at turbocharged HSDPA speeds like the Nokia N95 or the Motorola RAZR V3xx. Other wireless inclusions are tri-band GSM connectivity and Bluetooth 2.0, which supports the stereo music profile (A2DP) so you can use the W880i with wireless headphones as well as Bluetooth headsets and car kits.

Flight Mode allows you to listen to your tunes without sending out any radio signals, but a notable omission from the W880i's range of music features is an FM tuner -- most other Walkman phones come with this as standard. Bloggers will appreciate the W880i's ability to post pictures to Blogger accounts. Newbies to the blogosphere can set up their own blog through Google's Blogger on the Go service. An RSS reader also ties in with the W880i's Access NetFront browser allowing you to quickly check headlines from your favourite news sites, blogs or even (insert shameless plug) CNET.com.au's latest article feed.

Performance
As thin as the battery is, Sony Ericsson claims the W880i is capable of up to 6.5 hours of talk time or 425 hours (17 days) of standby per charge. Unfortunately we struggled to get more than three days from the W880i, with usage patterns of a few phone calls per day, a handful of text messages and a couple of minutes of 3G video content streaming. Two or three days from a phone isn't great; the W880i probably isn't the best phone for travellers.

We had no problems with the W880i's interface, which was fast and responsive. The Access NetFront browser does an decent job at scaling Web pages to fit on the W880i's relatively small screen and the W880i gets extra points for its Web 2.0 blogging and RSS features -- keep them coming Sony Ericsson!

Like the majority of Walkman phones, the W880i does an excellent job playing music. Not only are the headphones good -- although a 3.5mm jack like the 8GB Nokia N91 or the upcoming N76 would be better -- the W880i's Walkman application can be tweaked for equaliser settings, Mega Bass, stereo widenings and visualisations.

All up the Sony Ericsson W880i will appeal to those looking for a good music phone and those that seek a thin, fashionable phone. Try before you buy, though, as if you have big fingers, the keypad will drive you insane.