Play music on the W810i Walkman

The Sony Ericsson W810i is part of Sony Ericsson's Walkman phone stable, and once you’ve copied your digital music across to your handset, you can start using your phone as an MP3 player.

You can start using the Walkman system at any time by pressing the dedicated Walkman button on the handset (the orange one with the Walkman symbol). This will take you straight to the main Walkman screen that displays information about the track that is current ready to play (Figure 1). Use the directional pad to control the playback of your music.

If you want to select a new track from your music library, press Back to sort through your music. Highlighting Artists (Figure 2) and pressing Open will alphabetically sort your music according to artist name (Figure 3). Choosing Tracks will sort the files alphabetically according to the track name instead (Figure 4). Once you’ve selected a track you want to hear, press Play to return to the main Walkman screen and the track will start (Figure 5).

From here you can also adjust the levels to improve the sound quality. Press More to open up a new menu, then scroll down to Equalizer and press Select (Figure 6). You can choose whichever seems most appropriate to the type of music you’re listening to (Figure 7), but it is worth noting that ‘Mega Bass’ is a special setting designed to improve audio for higher quality headphones and Sony Ericsson’s own packaged earphones (Figure 8). You can manually set the audio levels by pressing Manual (Figure 9).

To turn on Shuffle and Loop, go to Play Mode after pressing More in the main Walkman screen (Figure 10).

One useful trick for skipping and pausing tracks without getting the phone out of your pocket and unlocking the keypad, is to use the play/pause button on the side. Unsurprisingly, the play/pause button does exactly what you would expect, but you can also skip tracks forward by holding the volume down button for a second or so. To skip back, hold the volume up button.