Sony Ericsson W980 review

The Sony Ericsson W980 may look great on paper, but once the handset is in your hands, things start to go downhill.

Although the W980 boasts an impressive 8GB of internal memory, touch screen controls, HSDPA, a Walkman music player and a 3.2-megapixel camera, it is hard to not notice a sense of cheapness and bad quality.

The exterior feels easily breakable, especially the low-resolution screen. As they touchscreen buttons are not very sensitive, it feels as if the screen will crack from too many firm presses, something necessary to get it to do what you want it to. Super flimsy is not a description to be used lightly, but it is definitely appropriate in the case of this Sony Ericsson.

There isn't a 3.5mm headphone jack on the W980, which means you have to insert the proprietary headphone adaptor in and then your own earphones. Not the greatest solution for a music device, especially as the headphone jack does double up as the USB port and charging socket. Multitasking? We think not.

If you open the W980 up, you'll see a retro-looking keypad which isn't particularly bad to use. The round keys are easy to press even if you do have chunky fingers, although the call answer/end buttons are a quite a bit smaller and and harder to press.

There's a dedicated Walkman player button on the inside of the W980, just in case you want to launch the player with the handset open, and if you close the clamshell (remembering to deactivate the key lock switch), you can continue using the Walkman MP3 player using the touch sensitive keys on the front.

Even if the touchscreen buttons are hard to use, the menu of the music player on the W980 is second to none, as you'd expect with a Walkman handset. The buttons don't just controls the music with the rather obvious forward/back skip, play/pause buttons, but if you're just browsing through the Walkman menu, the keys will transform into a four-way navigation control.

Despite Walkman handsets having a rather bad reputation when it comes to taking snaps, the W980 does quite well. There aren't any fancy features such as a high-powered flash or autofocus, but the pictures come out pretty well and excellently detailed except when it's dark.

The one quirk with the camera though, is the fact that the lens is on the back where your finger rests while using the keypad. Of course, this means you'll quite often get great shots of your finger but not much else.

Although 8GB of internal memory sounds good, what is lacking on the W980 is an expandable memory slot. Sure, 8GB of internal memory will give you lots of space for tunes and photos, but it's nice to have the option of expanding this to 16GB with an 8GB memory card. Plus if there was an external memory card slot, you could hot swap your memory cards depending on the occasion. Samsung has got this right with the i8510, but Sony Ericsson? Come on, catch up!

As a purely music-oriented handset, the W980 works fantastically. It may feel cheap in terms of build quality and the camera positioning may not be up to scratch, but the internal memory and Walkman music player certainly make it worth buying if you're a music fan and don't want to buy into the smartphone/iPhone market.