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Here's my review of my new phone - Sony Ericsson w300i.

First the colours. The black/grey body with orange dot matrix fonts on the top of the display is nice. The size of the phone is not terribly much smaller than the SE Z600 phone that it replaced. However what is most noticeable is just how light the unit is. Even with the battery inside, it is not heavy by any means.

As you can see, there's that grab handle up top, and I've been told it's the antenna. I welcome this because let's face it, although the Z600 has a neat and tidy design, reception was fairly poor. I couldn't even get a clean signal at my cubicle at work, need to walk to the window to get a single bar - and I work on the top floor! I hope that the newer phone will overcome this.

The camera is also better than the Z600, but again, nothing worth writing home about. Just about every last generation cell phone has (had) a VGA camera. I haven't played with the video record feature yet, but I doubt it'll be any more exciting, especially when videos are filmed at a paultry 176x144 - and that's the "large" size. Small settings will record in thumbnail-esque 128x96! Golly, that really is the size I use for thumbnail generation in ACDSee.

There are only 2 default games - PuzzlerSlider, and a 60 second trial ware for Midnight Casino from gameloft.com. The poker actually looks fun, but I don't think I'll pay for it. I hardly use my phone for games, and the new directional pad is terrible for games, as it sits flush with the rest of the keypad - or nearly.

Which leads to complaint number 1, the keys. As you can see from the pictures from the previous post, they are not nicely shaped individual keys. To save space, they have made the keypad look like fish scales, one button overlapping another all the way to the end. The keys aren't raised either, again, flushed with the face of the keypad. I doubt I'll ever be able to touch type numbers from now on. I guess I'll be forced to start using voice activated dialing from now on.

I can see it now. "Computer. Dial 'idiot'."
""Beep*boop*bop* - Connecting"
"Yo, Kachin, what's up?" (hahahaha - sorry Kachin!)

Complaint number 2 I guess is the lack of a shortcut to turning on/off IR and Bluetooth. The old phone's right "action" button used to say be labelled as "MORE", which when pressed, you could make it go silent, enable bluetooth, etc. Now, it is called "Internet" - which encourages one to waste money on transferring bits and pieces of fluff, and if I remember correctly, it is billed by the Kb, and gets expensive hecka quick. Not good. And the marketing works, I've gone online 3 times now. Ouch.

Back to features. The phone has a lot of accessories in the form of cables. There's a data cable for attaching to the PC, there's a cable for handsfree actuation, and finally, earbuds that plug into said handsfree hack for some MP3 and Radio luvin', which acts as an antenna.

That's cool I guess, but I haven't tried the radio function yet. I'm sure it'll work as advertise, but I don't know how often I need to listen to the radio with my phone. Maybe on the bike, but then I already have an MP3/radio player for that.

The phone comes with 512mb of memory, which is 256mb more than what's been reviewed online. 512mb isn't a lot, but it's enough for songs, and some .3GP video clips. "Pussycat Doll - Buttons" music video is nice and small at ~3.5MB. The only caveat is that the size matches the video quality. I don't know how these things work, as this is the first phone I've had that enabled moving video to be displayed, but at a screensize of 128x160, pixelated is a good word to describing the experience. Also, because the size is not even remotely 4:3 aspect ratio, everything looks either too tiny, or stretched portrait-wise, or both. Log it in as complaint number 3 I guess, as they should have done a landscape rotate mode.

The lack of a true LCD screen at the front panel can be seen as a minus. My buddy's phone (can't recall who, or which model) will show the picture of the person calling, well as long as you have it associated as such. I'd probably end up putting cartoon animals for all my friends, so the unlucky person who has the pig would probably end up hating me. So maye it's a bonus - besides, the orange dot matrix words are actually pretty cool to look at at night.

When not in use, the time is displayed on the front panel, which moves around the screen every minute or so. I didn't time this, so I'm guesstimating, but it's a good way to prevent pixel burn-ins.

The biggest selling feature of this phone is the mp3 playback, and I'm happy to repor t that it works as advertised. Loading them up is simple as well since attaching included USB cable to a WinXP OS will automatically be recognized as a Mass Storage Device which means I can drag/drop songs into the correct folder and be done.

Of course, it isn't always easy to figure out where to drop the files to. I still have yet to figure out how to drag/drop a game into the correct placement for example. I'll figure it out eventually. I don't want to install the software that comes on the CD in the package, as anything Sony is bloatware in my mind. I'm trying to keep it as simple as I can. The other alternative is to remove the Sony Memory Stick micro, place it in the included memory stick adapter (Thank you Sony for including that adapter!) and then load the files thusly. Again, I still don't know where to place game files, yet.

Complaint number 4, here I come. If you look at the pictures, you will see a red "button" at the top/left edge of the phone. Actually, it is 3 buttons - Up, Down, Play/pause. The up/down toggles as far as I can tell are for volume. Whether that means volume during a phone conversation, to mp3 volume during playblack, those buttons are it. However, the middle button, that's the kicker.

Let me once again stress that the up/down buttons are for volume. So let's say you're watching a .3GP video, which apparently, you cannot fast forward or rewind through the clip. And while watching, let's say you decide you need to pump the volume up. So you do - except you push the stupid play/pause button. Guess what? You don't pause the video, instead, it starts playing MP3s. Which sucks, because you're 30 seconds from the next episode of Lost, and right before you find out whether they're found or not, you start listening to Nate Dogg! Now you have to re-watch the whole bloody show all over again because you just can't FF to the good part! That gets my goat everytime I think about it. Now, maybe if I encode to another video format, it'll support FF/RW because I know the demo videos that came with the phone could do it, but definitely not .3GP codecs.

Everything else is standard fare. I cannot believe they don't have a lot of ringtones, and to this day, I can't use .MP3s as ringtones - instead needing them to still be midi files. Plus all the default rings are retarded. They're stupid sounding songs. All of them. I had to go and download ringtones online to get anything remotely annoying - which will help me hear it when I'm at the gym.

In the end, I like the phone. The look and weight of the unit is very nice. The colour scheme works. The reception thus far has been spot-on.

I know I won't be using many of its features. I know I will not encode videos for it, except as a proof of concept. I will not be playing all too many MP3s because it just takes too long to transfer files with the included USB data cable.

Oh yes, one last thing, the speaker in the phone. It is surprisingly clear, and I don't have ANY problem with watching a music video with it. Obviously it's mono, but at least it's clear and crisp. Not bad at all.

....I like my phone enough to post about it.

posted by losir at 11:00 PM