Using your W850i as a Walkman

The Sony Ericsson W850i comes with an integrated Walkman music player, so 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 at any time by pressing the dedicated Walkman button on the handset (the orange bar that lights up when pressed). This will take you straight to the main Walkman screen that displays information about the track that is ready to play (Figure 1). Press Play or the centre button to play (or pause) the queued track, and use the directional pad to control the playback of your music.

If you want to select a new track from your music library, press More and select My music to sort through your music (Figure 2). Highlighting Artists and pressing Open will alphabetically display your music according to artist name (Figures 3 & 4). Choosing Albums or Tracks will sort the files alphabetically according to the album or track name instead. You can also use the navigation keypad to scroll through categories and tracks. 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).

Queue the next track
To choose a track to play once the current track has finished, highlight it as above, but instead of pressing Play, press More, highlight Queue and press Select (Figure 6). The track will be added to the current playlist. To view the playlist while the current song is playing, press the down nav key on the main Walkman screen.

Set up a playlist
When you’ve created a live playlist by queuing a set of tracks, you can save the playlist from the Walkman screen or the Play queue by clicking More, highlighting Save playlist and clicking Select (Figure 7). You’ll be prompted to give the playlist a name. Enter the name and click OK.

To load a saved playlist, enter your music library by clicking More, highlight My Music and clicking Select. Scroll down to Playlists (Figure 8) and click the right navigation key to display the saved playlists. Click Open and Play to select the playlist you want to hear (Figures 9 & 10).

To add a file to an existing playlist, open a playlist in the My music browser, click More, highlight Add media and click Select (Figure 11). Highlight the track or tracks you want to add, and click Mark so a tick appears in the checkbox to the right of the song title (Figure 12). When you’ve marked all the tracks you want to add, click Add and the additional tracks will be added to the playlist (Figure 13).

To add an entire album or all the tracks by a particular artist – and providing your music files are organised properly – highlight an artist or album folder name and click Mark to add a tick into its checkbox. Then click More, highlight Add and click Select to confirm the addition.

To remove a track from a playlist, highlight the track name within the relevant playlist section in My Music, click More, highlight Delete and press Select (Figure 14). Click Yes to confirm the deletion from the playlist (Figure 15) – the file is not deleted from the phone or card memory.

To turn on Shuffle and Loop, press More in the main Walkman screen, choose Settings and Play mode (Figure 16), press Select and switch Shuffle or Loop on. Shuffle plays the songs in a playlist in a random order, while Loop plays them in the order they were queued, (Figure 17) returning to the first track at the end of the playlist.

Improve the sound quality
From here you can also adjust the levels to improve the sound quality. Press More in the Walkman screen to open up a new menu, highlight Settings, click the right nav key, highlight Equalizer and press Select (Figure 18). You can choose whichever seems most appropriate to the type of music you’re listening to (Figure 19), 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 20).

You can manually set the equalizer’s audio levels by pressing Manual, and using the up and down nav keys to change the audio channels in turn; use the left and right nav keys to move between channels. The sound will change as you highlight each setting; press Select to return to Walkman mode when you’re happy with the equalizer setting.

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.