Waiting for Lunchtime

I love my phone

A week ago I took delivery of a new mobile phone, my first new handset for three-and-a-half years. It's a Sony Ericsson W850i Walkman phone, and after a week's use what can I say -- it's fantastic!

The Walkman/music-player side of things is absolutely top notch. My phone came with a 1Gb Sony memory stick, so that's plenty of room for a week's-worth of music to listen to during an hour each-way commute on the tube. The hands-free adapter doubles as music headphones, and the S-E supplied in-ear headphones produce very high-quality sound. They successfully minimize ambient noise (vital on the tube) and have excellent sound quality from bass through to high trebles. But if that's not good enough for you, the adapter can take any 3.5mm headphones of your choice.

The Walkman feature itself is pretty easy to use, and once it's playing music you can minimise it to the background so that you can use other phone features. It automatically pauses the music if you make or receive a call, then restarts it afterwards. There's also an FM radio with RDS built-in, so you should never run short of things to listen to.

The phone features are just as you'd expect: quad-band GSM and 3G. Vodafone offer a television-on-your-mobile service which the handset is supposed to be compatible with, but I haven't tried that yet. Otherwise internet services work well: browsing is fast and clear on the display, and there's a handy little RSS reader too (which only updates on demand, so you don't end up running up high data charges).

The only problem I've had so far is with the supplied PC software -- I couldn't get it to work happily with Bluetooth, although it was fine with the USB data cable. In the end I uninstalled the software from my PC and I can still communicate with the phone via the data cable, it just appears as a USB mass storage device on my computer.

All-in-all it's a very nifty little handset, which means I can now happily retire my trusty-but-ageing Motorola v525. Definitely recommended!

Labels: gadgets

posted by Iain @ 09:41