Review: Sony Ericsson W810i

Following up on the pictures I took from the Sony Ericsson W810i, I have much more to add in terms of the features that I have experienced in the last 3 weeks. So here goes.

Looks
Sleek, classy, impressive, and all around business look. An upgrade to the popular W800i, it’s all dressed in black, with a dash of orchid orange and silver from the Walkman series of devices developed by Sony Ericsson.

Physical Quality
Mine slightly produces creaks when I play around with it, a friend’s doesn’t. So those reviews that state all such devices make a specific creaking noise, I’d disagree. The screen, keypad, speakers and camera lens fit in and look absolutely astounding when you put them altogether in a neat and concise package.

Picture / Screen
Excellent picture quality, bright colours, and of course great graphics engine. I personally find it great. You might consider the overall screen size to be small, if you compare with the screens of Nokia 6233, Samsung X700 and SE K800i, but overall a good display and sufficiently sized compared to the overall dimensions of the device.

Sound / Audio
Wonderful, at least through the headphones. The way you can practically play around with the various controls gives you the feeling of absolute flexibility. The best part is the set of side controls (similar to those on K750i, W800i and W700i) to play/pause, volume and track skip (backward and forward).

Camera
For me, it’s just great. Before this phone I had a 0.3 MP camera phone, which under no circumstances compares to the 2.0 MP camera with auto-focus, white balance and macro mode features built in to give that extra punch to your photography skills.

Memory
Built-in memory is 20MB, supported with a supplied memory card of 512MB. The memory card slot supports hot-swapping and can hold up to 2GB of memory. This can be equally shared for audio, video, documents, images etc, for which the phone automatically creates folders.

Internet / Data
Support GPRS and EDGE connectivity, and so far I haven’t found any fallback in terms of load-balancing. You can use the phone as a modem too, linking to your mobile service providers network as an ISP direct via Bluetooth dialup and through cable. Since most applications you install on the device are Java based, hence the dependency will be on the singular Java engine. This means you can run only one Java application at a time. Of course, you can find a suitable application/software that supports many features simultaneously.

Software and Accessories (supplied)
The box includes 1 CD, consisting of the PC Suite for the handset, and a CD2Phone software (suitable for ripping CDs, compressing to MP3 format and directly transferring to the phone directly). Drivers for USB File transfer mode is also included in the CD.

Conclusion
Handy, light-weight, and overall class outlook; I give this phone the top of the line ranking. Coming from a guy who used a SE P910i just before this, you better believe it. And if you ask me, I’m going to hold on to this phone for a good long time (unlike previous ones that I disposed off within 15 months of use :D) hehehe.

Credits
I loved this phone since the day it released. Nevertheless, there are a few people who have added their opinions to get me to buy this phone finally (me rethinking several times before taking the plunge). So these are Iced Mocha, Rutaba, Fatima, Sammy, Untamed Desires and of course ME 🙂 Not to forget the several reviews I read on the internet till just a month before purchase…. so yeah… now that’s called doing justice 😀