Sony Ericsson W880i review

Sony Ericsson W880i Review

Reviewed by: Andrew Lim

Reviewed on: 23 February 2007

Features
The W880i is a Walkman phone, so everything is centred around music, right down to the dedicated music button that takes you straight to the Walkman player.

The Walkman player supports the most popular file formats, including MP3 and AAC files. It displays the track, artist and album name and can be set to play tracks in shuffle and repeat mode, and there's an equaliser you can adjust. Another good featre is that it can display album art, and visualisations too.

Uploading tracks is relatively straightforward using the Disc2Phone software and we didn't have any problems uploading a 13-track Kaiser Chiefs album. If you do have any problems uploading music then our guide to getting music on to your Walkman phone might help.

To listen to music, you can either use the provided headphones or your own pair via the 3.5mm in-line adaptor. You can also use the loudspeaker to listen to music, but the sound quality, while loud, is bad and will only annoy everyone around you.

Alternatively, you can connect a pair of stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) headphones and listen to your music wirelessly. The only problem we found with doing this is that the battery drained very quickly.

Sony Ericsson has kindly bundled a 1GB Memory Stick Micro (M2) card in the box that lets you store about 240 MP3 files, but you can also use it to store data too, as the W880i can be set to act as a mass storage device.

You can also use the card to store a whole bunch of photos and videos that you can take using the 2-megapixel camera on the back. The camera is a little disappointing to use since there's no auto-focus, flash or LED photo light.

Once you have taken a picture you can send it to your friends over Bluetooth or download it to your computer using the provided USB cable. There's also the useful ability to send it to a Blogger blog straight from your phone, which is great if you want to publish photos online very quickly and share your thoughts with loads of people.

You can download photos and other content using the W880i's 3G connectivity, which also lets you make video calls using the VGA camera on the front of the phone, and browse the Web at speeds of up to 384Kbps in areas with good 3G coverage.

The screen is too small for browsing the Web properly, but you can connect a laptop via the provided USB cable and use it as a modem.

Install Sony Ericsson's PC suite and you can synchronise your Outlook contacts, calendar, tasks, notes and Internet Explorer bookmarks with the mobile. You can also use it to look through files, photos and videos stored on the W880i.

Other features on the W880i include a flight mode, an RSS feed reader, MMS and SMS messaging, an email client, a calendar, an alarm clock, tasks, a voice recorder, a Bluetooth remote, a video player, Java games, a timer, a stopwatch, a calculator, a file manager and over-the-air synchronisation.

The W880i comes in silver and black or orange and black casing