Division is rife in the gadget world, Smartphones are thought to be for the business man or woman and the multimedia mobile is the preserve of the under 25 tech savvy kids, but wait why can’t a suited and booted business chap have a multimedia phone. That’s the kind of thinking we’ve ended up at after a week with the Sony Ericsson W810i music phone, a phone that’s squarely pitched at MP3 toting teens that has found favour as corporate handout material.

Imagine being given a W810i as your work phone, the shock would wear off quickly and you’d be left looking at the attractive design of the Ericsson multimedia phone. Measuring 100 x 46 x 19.5 mm and just sneaking below the 100g weight mark it’s a lot smaller than your average smartphone and feels great in the hand. Sony have clearly spent time upgrading the W800i with a better build quality and a splash of extra style. It was a relief that the pervious garish orange colours used by Sony Ericsson had been toned down for this model and the cool black with silver accents and a tiny slash of orange is much more acceptable to the eye on those early morning starts.

The screen is a 1.8 inch 176 x 220 pixel unit which is similar to that on the K750 and is hardly likely to set the world alight when better resolutions are easy to find further up the range. However the screen does do a good job with bright and vibrant colours and clearly readable text which is about as much as you can ask for from a mid tier mobile, a nice touch is the inclusion of a light sensor that adjust the screen brightness according to the ambient light. This both lengthens battery life and ensures you can read the screen in all but direct sunlight. It’s use is proven when the backlight timer kicks in and switches it off which sees the screen go jet black, all very cool but there is no way to adjust the backlight timer duration!  The keypad is well spaced even for larger fingers and nowhere near as cramped as some Sony phones of the past year, the tactile feedback has also been improved with good feel for the keys as they are slightly raised making it possible to text by feel rather than sight.

The W810i is a Quad band GSM 850,900,1800,1900 mobile with Edge data capabilities allowing GPRS speed data connections but as this is not a 3G phone it’s not suitable for those who want to transfer data on the move. It’s best to think of the W810i as a nice funky mobile that is good for office use but is packed with multimedia goodies and this is why.

The primary multimedia feature is the music player, or "Walkman" as Sony rather obviously band it. We’re not quite so sure it deserves the rather revolutionary brand name that for those of us that can remember had such an impact in the early eighties. However the Sony music player is a rather fine example of how to get MP3 playback into a mobile and one which iTunes and Motorola could learn a lot from. The software supports playback of both MP3 and ACC files making it compatible with most peoples music collections, the player fires up with one press of the Walkman button and the controls change their function with the main joystick acting as playback control. The whole package is very user friendly and the sound quality is first class which is even more obvious should you choose to hook it up to a speaker system, we were stunned that a small mobile could really sound that good. We also liked the 3.5mm stereo jack which enables you to use any earphones you like with the hone and not be limited to those supplied as other phones force upon you. We used the W810i on the London tube with our Shure E2C’s and found the experience to be as good as using an iPod!

In order to play MP3 files you do have to be able to store them so the Sony Memory Stick Duo support is key for getting multimedia content onto your W810i as the onboard space is a tiny 20mb. However using the Duo slot you can add 1gb of memory for around £50 which turns the phone into an iPod shuffle equivalent, except this has a nice interface and is very easy to use. Sony aren’t too tight with the standard package and do include a 512mb Duo card so you may even get away without spending any extra on upgrades. Getting media onto the W810i is best achieved by slotting the Duo card into a PC card reader or into the inbuilt slot on a Sony Laptop as the USB connection on the phone is only USB 1.1 which is very slow to move MP3 files over.

Should you run out of music there is also an FM radio which is very common on mobiles, but the Sony one supports RDS (the radio data system) and so you get station names and auto tuning which makes for easy use.

Overall the W810i has a great menu system which puts Nokia to shame, the Sony user interface is the best on the market by a clear nose and nice touches such as icons that flip and animate when your select them and siding menus just make you feel that this is money well spent and that the phone has a solid operating system. Changes for this model include a kind of active standby using the silver knob, which gives quick access to 4 features as defined by the user, users of current Nokia phones will be familiar with this extra.

Round the back of the phone is the customary camera, this one is only a 2 mega pixel version (only 2 megapixel doh!) but it provides sharp and useable images, plus it has a built in LED flash which is good for short range shots only. The camera lacks the inbuilt shutter, which other SE models now sport but this does help keep the package nice and thin, plus we think that users will select this more for its walkman features as opposed the camera.

For the serious business user or the heavy Walkman user battery life is key, the stated times are around 8 hours of talktime and 350 hours on standby, but real life use shows that these are optimistic. With basic phone use we managed 5 days on standby with a moderate amount of calls, however user of the Walkman really tarts to eat the phones battery so much so that with some calls and use of the Walkman on a commute we needed a charge after 2.5 days of use, to be fair this is quite acceptable.

We mustn't forget this is a mobile phone and our tests showed it to have average RF performance hanging onto most calls with only one drop while using it on the road. Call quality is a bit noisy sometimes with a little hiss and electronic distortion, this really isn't an issue but is worth noting for those who are annoyed by small imperfections in audio quality.

Sony have equipped this model with all the usual PIM features and these should suffice for most corporate users, you can sync your outlook information, contacts and calendar over the USB or Bluetooth connection and if you must use it there is an Infared port too. There is a Netfront web browser and support for WAP plus a basic email client so in theory it does bridge the gap to the Smartphones but it is not a Blackberry by any stroke of the imagination.

Overall the Sony Ericsson W810i is a good and useable mobile phone that packs some serious muscle when it comes to playing music. It’s not your usual corporate offering and most companies will stick to basic Nokia models or issue Blackberry's. From our use this seems flawed as the W810i offers a good small mobile that is most suited to corporate life and yet is that bit more exciting and would leave your staff feeling you’d given them a gift rather than a chain to the office.

Published - 02/07/2006

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