Sony Ericsson W302 review

When Sony Ericsson launched its latest Walkman series mobile phone, the W302 in the Indian market, it projected it as the most affordable Walkman series music phone from its stable.

At the same time the company also launched two other mobile phones, the W902 and W595.

Now, lets check the W302 out.

It’s compact, for one thing. At just 10.5mm and 78g it’s very light and slim in the pocket. The rubberised plastic casing feels sturdy and the front panel is aluminium, which elevates it slightly in the class stakes. On the sides are a volume rocker, camera shutter button and a dedicated Walkman button, which gets you straight into the phone’s music player.

The keypad is a lesson in compact usability. The buttons are tiny, especially the proliferation of keys around the circular D-pad – six in all including call start and stop, shortcuts, cancel and two soft keys. But at no point is it tricky to use, since the buttons are distinctive enough under the thumb so you always know exactly where you are.

The music player is of course the centre of the Walkman universe and the W302 has all the essentials. It’s easy to add tracks using Sony Ericsson’s sync software or by merely dragging and dropping from your PC. Stereo Bluetooth also allows you to add tracks from other handsets, as well as giving the option of using wireless headphones.

The supplied headphones aren’t top of Sony Ericsson’s range, but they’re still pretty good, offering a decent dynamic range with no shortage of tight, controlled bass. There’s no 3.5mm jack plug on the handset itself but the headphones come with an adaptor for the Sony Ericsson power plug (no real advantage there).

Swapping tracks via Bluetooth is painless, since the W302 will automatically add them to your music list, complete with track data if available.

The built-in FM radio offers nine presets, less than you’ll find on other Walkman phones but which most people will find to be ample. There’s also RDS for track and station information where available. You’ll need to use the headphones as your aerial, but there’s the option to play in mono or stereo to improve the sound quality depending on the station. There’s also Sony Ericsson’s justly acclaimed TrackID service, which lets you identify tracks on the radio (or anywhere else for that matter) using the phone’s online connection.

There’s no option to automatically search for available stations however – you’ll need to tune through the frequencies manually to find them. You can multitask while getting on down over the airwaves though, as you can minimise the radio and use the handset as normal with the music running in the background, as you can with the music player.

The two-megapixel camera is nothing to write home about in these 8-meg-plus times but it’s better than similarly specced cameras from the likes of Apple, HTC and Nokia. Within its quality limits, it’s a decent little camera, with a good array of options including up to 1600x1200 picture resolution, 2.5x zoom, timer (up to 15 seconds), ‘night mode’ and burst (four pictures). It’s easy to upload pics to the internet too using the Blogger service. The pictures are of decent quality too, if taken in good light, and even video holds up rather better than you might expect. All of which puts it a cut above the average 2 megapixel camera, but if photography is important to you, this isn’t the phone for you.

There’s a mere 20MB of memory on board, though it comes with a 512MB microSD card (it can handle up to 4GB)which is hot-swappable, though you’ll need to remove the back to get to it.

It’s a quad band handset, which makes it handy for roaming, but without 3G it’s unlikely you’ll make much use of the web browser, though the WAP alternative is perfectly serviceable, even for music downloads, so long as you don’t mind waiting.

Battery-wise it held up well, giving us a good three days of average use, including an hour or so of continuous music playback.

This isn’t a trick and treat gadget phone – if you like to carry a wealth of features in your pocket, look elsewhere. Shelling out for the next Walkman up, the W595, will get you a sharper screen and 3G connection, longer battery life and a 3.2 megapixel camera, but it’s bigger, heavier and of course costs a bit more. If you want a compact, simple phone that won’t break the bank and focuses on music, look no further.