Sometimes you don't want a massive Sunday roast with all the trimmings -- you just want something light. The Sony Ericsson W302 Walkman is light like a plate of sashimi, both in terms of its features and weight, at only 79g.
Luckily, it's also light on price. It's available from free on £25-per-month contracts with O2 and Orange, or from £60 on pay as you go with T-Mobile.
Big sounds, small
package
The W302 is aimed squarely at the budget buyer, but it's still a member of
Sony's Walkman
family, so its sound quality is excellent. We compared the sound output
from the W302 against our usual test set-up -- the wonderful SanDisk
Sansa Fuze MP3 player and a pair of beautiful Audio-Technica headphones. The W302 sounded clear and full when we listened with
our own headphones, and we noticed hardly any difference in sound quality.
When we used the included in-ear headphones, however, we found that the sound lost some of its spaciousness. The audio quality was still good, though, considering that we were using cheap, plasticky earbuds.
Unsurprisingly, like its Walkman cousins, the W302 has a proprietary USB port instead of a 3.5mm headphone jack. An adaptor is included, but it adds about a metre to the cable length, so you could end up throttling yourself to music. It also means that we had to unplug the headphones every time we transferred music, so that we could plug in the USB cable. But the W302 does have stereo Bluetooth, so it could stream to a set of wireless headphones.
The handset includes an FM radio, which picked up a strong signal during all our travels around central London. It has RDS and TrackID, which can identify a song based on a clip of a few seconds. We found TrackID worked perfectly with pop songs on the radio, and failed gracefully with speech radio and the like, which it didn't recognise.
The user interface for the radio isn't as good as that of other Walkman handsets we've tried. Scrolling through stations is a slow process, setting up new stored stations is confusing, and the lack of a skip function is criminal.
The W302 doesn't support podcast subscriptions, which is a feature we love in handsets that are higher up the Sony Ericsson totem pole, like the W705 Walkman, for example. You can sync podcasts along with your other music using the free Media Manager software, but we're not fans of the software's usability. We like that it supports drag and drop, but it reorganised our music based on its own rules, and it's not clear what file formats are supported. We had to check the W302's folding user manual to learn that MP3, MP4, 3GP, AAC, MIDI, IMY, EMY and WAV are the supported formats.
Files in all of those formats can be packed onto the handset's 512MB memory stick. If you like, you can spend the money saved by not buying a pricier phone on a memory-stick upgrade, up to 4GB. The W302 also has 20MB of on-board memory.
Boring browsing
The W302's music features got us through the night, but the rest of the
package let us down. Pictures look fine on the 176x220-pixel screen -- nothing to
write home about, but clear and bright, with vibrant colours. But Web pages
look awful in the browser, with images an over-compressed mess. Since it also
doesn't have 3G or Wi-Fi, we wouldn't recommend the W302 for anything more than
an occasional emergency Google search.
Say cheesy
The 2-megapixel camera can shoot video or stills, but, with no flash or LED,
it's only suitable for snapshots in bright light. The video quality is dreadful,
rendering CNET UK colleagues and potted plants as similarly blurry blobs.
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User reviews2
Add your review
mayank.shah 20 July 2010
Good: Easy music, easy to use
Bad: Extremely Slow, not much use apart from music
Comment: I have had it for nearly a year now .. it was a bit disappointing when i opened the box to be honest. i found it was perfect for music when i didnt want to take my ipod around. the buttons do take some getting used to but are fine after. the phone is extremely slow and sometimes i find there to be huge amounts of lag even when typing
Ranny 8 July 2010
Good: Very small and compact - fits into pocket well.
Bad: No 3.5mm headphone jack, Very poor camera, unreliable signal problems.
Comment: First lets start with a positive: This phone is very small and it is a fantastic size! The phone easily slips in and out of a pocket and it is very good in this respect.
However, the phone has quite a few problems. First, the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack. On primarily a music device, you would expect a standard jack so you could use your own headphones. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the suppied set of headphones were decent, but they are not - bad quality and uncomfy in the ear.
Also the camera is bad, especially the video capture. It can take a semi-decent shot outside in sunlight but inside and when it is dark, the camera is rubbish. Worser still is the video capture. It has such a low resolution and fps that it is very hard to actually tell what is in the shot!
Also, there is a signal problem which is very annoying. Often the phone says it has full signal but actually there is none and you can't send or recieve texts or calls. This is fixed by turning the phone off then back on again, but this is not ideal.
I am not going to mention the lack of features such as 3G because you wouldn't expect that on a £60 device but the features it should be good at, it simply isn't.
Only get this phone if you want a cheap phone which is small and for the occasional text - that is all it is good at.
See all 2 user reviews