Sony Ericsson W300i review

John Murphy

Many phones promise to be all things to all men but the W300i is not a jack of all trades. It is an excellent music phone. Full stop.

We review the Sony Ericsson W300i - an entry-level Walkman phone ideal for penny-pinching music fans who are not bothered about taking photos

If you have your entire music collection on your very expensive, top of the range iPod you probably don’t want to carry it everywhere with you. Apart from the bulkiness do you really want to re-live all those weeks of ripping your CD collection to fill the device up if you get mugged?

Putting an MP3 player into your mobile phone is the obvious answer, only one device to lug about or lose. Many phones promise to be all things to all men but the W300i is not a jack of all trades. It is an excellent music phone. Full stop.

It plays high quality music and works well as a phone with powerful phone features and excellent back up from Sony Ericsson in terms of software and a support website.

When the Walkman phone range was announced people remarked at the rather high price. OK for a businessman on a fat contract, but well out of the range of teenagers with pay-as-you-go who you might expect to be the target market for a Walkman phone. Sony Ericsson responded with the W300i, and subsequently with the W200 that is even cheaper.

The sound quality is excellent, better than the headset can deliver in fact. The memory is limited by the use of a Sony M2 memory stick; the standard package comes with 256MB which is about 50-70 songs depending on the file size. This can be boosted by using compressed files. 1GB memory sticks are available on eBay for £20-25 and there is a 2GB stick for about twice as much.

The W300i also works very well as a phone. The clamshell package is very compact and feels good in your hand. The plastic outer casing can be replaced by jazzier ones if you look in places like eBay.

The keypad is not perfect for marathon texters and the screen is small and a bit grainy. Also the camera is only 0.3 megapixels and the video quality is a bit choppy, but this is a music phone - if you want a camera phone there are better elsewhere.

For the price you get an excellent music phone with lots of grown-up features like Bluetooth, a personal organiser that syncs with Outlook, FM radio for when you run out of music, easy email and MMS and Internet access through GPRS.

The W300i comes in a box with a headset adaptor with wired handsfree, USB connector cable, charger and a CD of useful software including Disc2Phone.