Sony Ericsson W810i review

Sony Ericsson w810i was launched to the Indian market at a time when there was no clear framework or date line for 3G services announced in India. However, the device was another Walkman style phone to hit the Indian market.

The Sony Ericsson W810i was the successor to the earlier released very successful Sony Ericsson W800i, the phone that reinvented the Walkman brand devices back for the company and music lovers worldwide.

A step ahead from its predecessor, the new Sony Ericsson W810i comes with minor tweaks. However, the company manages the original look without much deviation in the orginal design aspect. The phone sports a similar candybar shape with a 262k colour, 176 x 220 pixel screen. It offers static controls, moving away from the traditional four-way joystick, which is designed for better media navigation and playback control.

You can find the Walkman button placed towards the left hand side, which has made way for a new Activity menu button on the right. The device offers far brighter screen, which is a delight to use in direct sunlight.

The USP of the device is certainly its mobile entertainment feature. Other than the Walkman music system (compatible with AAC and MP3 audio), you can get access to an FM radio, a 2-megapixels digital camera, MMS messaging and a GPRS-powered web browser with EDGE technology on this device. Preloaded with 20MB of internal memory, the phone also offers a Memory Stick Pro Duo card slot at its side for memory expansion.

Overall, the new Sony Ericsson W810i is designed with some distinct improvements and the performance of the device speaks volume for the same. The user interface is simple to use. If you have used a Sony Ericsson device earlier, you will be able to understand it in no time. However, if this happens to be your first Sony Ericsson handset, you will find the menu design and controls quite simple and very straight-forward to use. It comes with all the menu functions laid out in categories in one 4 x 3 grid and indicated by simple labels and icons.

On the flip side, there are some minor issues that disappoints a users while using this device. We were not very much satisfied with the call quality as it occasionally dropped on the network that we tried. The slow operating system again mars the performance of the device when you try to transfer music to the phone via the recommended computer software.

Its main function is converting incompatible file types, such as WMA, into compatible ones and copying them across. That can be quite handy, but for some reason it always decides to put compatible MP3 files through the process as well, which also slows the process down.

In short, the device is a pretty decent Walkman phone with its intuitive menu layout coupled with the strong feature set. Visually it isn’t that great but somewhat average compared to the high-end smartphones available in the markt. Still, it has an array of entertainment tools that make it stand tall in the crowd as a solid, all-rounder entertainment device and one of the best handsets around.