Sony Ericsson W810 Review

Sony Ericsson are very successful in using the names of some of their products, which are worldwide famous, to get free advertisement and establish themselves even more as one of the leading powers in the mobile phone manufacturing. The Walkman line started more than 2 decades ago, but recently it has been offered in a mobile phone format – precisely Walkman is the branding of the “W” series of Sony Ericsson, which include advanced music options for phones, trying to get them closer to the music players out there. W810 is the descendant of the W800 and is built on its basis, but some of the problematic zones, such as the joystick and the mobile internet, are changed, so is the panel color (from white to black) combined with the familiar orange of Walkman.

Similar to other phones from the series, the W810 is pre-packaged with a large set accessories, which gives you the opportunity to listen to your favorite music without having to buy any additional ones. A 512 MB card is included in the pack, and it can be changed with a larger one. A USB cable is also available, but sadly the connection with the computer is slow. An interesting accessory is the hands-free: it consists of two parts – the first one is the “jack”, which connects to the port of the Sony Ericsson and ends with a microphone equipped with a start/end call button, which is of the 3.5 mm type; the second part is the 3.5 mm “plug-in-ears” headphones for a “richer musical experience”. Luckily, because the headphones are of the standard 3.5 mm type, they can be replaced with other types of headphones.

The W810 is in a classic mono-block design with an internal antenna, where the size stays the same as the W800 and K750 – comparatively compact and at the same time comfortable size – the only remark about the dimensions that we have is the thickness, which is far thicker than the Motorola SLVR L7 for example, which has similar features.

PEBL and W810	PEBL and W810	PEBL and W810
W810 and iPod Nano	W810 and iPod Nano	W810 and iPod Nano

The phone is entirely made out of plastic and a few different colors are used: for the front and the rear is used light black dimmed plastic, which keeps the phone clean during usage, without any stains on it. The frame (the side, the upper and the lower parts) is out of darker plastic with a metallic “pearl” shade, which looks very stylish and pleasant. In addition in thicker and glossier black is a little part around the camera, the logo of Walkman on the front and four of the navigational buttons. In orange (the color of Walkman) are the Walkman logos on the front and the back panel, again the Walkman button for starting the player and a small, but distinct detail such as the cover for the additional antenna.


On the left side is located the MSD slot, such as it is covered with a black cover like the one of the K750. Overall the phone consists of a few different shades of black and the highly contrasted orange and metallic grey (used on the navigation button), such as the make is not solid enough and makes unpleasant noises when pressure is applied on the plastic panel. There is little movement of the battery cover, which is a small but unpleasant drawback.


The keypad is well made and doesn't make any strong, irritating noises to bother you during usage of the phone. The usage of the phone is comfortable and pleasant and is easy to operate with both left and right hands. The side buttons are well positioned and easy to reach and press, but the advantage have the left handed, since the play/pause button on the left side is more comfortable to press.
When using the camera or looking through pictures in landscape regime, the phone is held with both hands and the camera button on the right is comfortable to use. If you hold the phone in landscape with only one hand, you will not have access to the “zoom” buttons. The size is good and it is easy to fit in narrower pockets, and also can be easily carried in a shirt pocket.

The display is the same as the previous models from the gamma – the type is TFT with 176x220 pixels in resolution. Its size is 1.9”, which is acceptable, but in such a size of a handset, a display in the range of 2.2” can be fitted in for example. Sadly Sony Ericsson have not used something newer and more technological, such as 2.2” QVGA 240x320, which would look far better. Besides the not very large size, the display is bright and contrasted and is very well seen even in bight light during the day and is hard to dim from reflections on it.

The keypad is entirely changed and is totally different from the one of the W800. For starters – the joystick is switched with a d-pad, with engraved functions on it that it carries on a Walkman player turned on. The Back and Clear buttons are combined with one software key each, and next to them are inserted the walkman button and the shortcuts one, unlike the W800 and the K750, which only had one of these buttons. The usage of this part of the keypad is comfortable, and it very rear to make a mistake. The only problem is the lighting of the d-pad, which lights up the middle, but does not light up the functions of the different directions.

The 0-9 keypad is standard such as the buttons are separated from each other, and are not 3 in a row or the entire grid of 12 keys like the W800 and the K750. They are raised and easy to use without having to look at the phone in order to dial a number. They also have good response and are easy to press. They as well (similar to the navigational buttons) are light up in orange a la Walkman, such as there is a slight shade of the light in the far right and left of the keypad.

In the upper part of the left side, above the Walkman logo is located the play/pause button, which plays or stops the music regardless of which menu are you located in. Symmetrically on the right side is the volume up/down key, which operates as a zoom rocker while using the camera or looking through pictures and on hold it changes the songs that the player plays. These two buttons are not light up, but are raised and are easy to find even in the dark. On the right side is located the camera button as well. It is slightly raised to the side and when held turns the camera on, and when the camera is on is used as the shutter button. It is light up, but unexpectedly is colored white, which is not any of the colors used on the rest of the phone (the entire keypad is orange). Besides that the light is stronger in its upper part and far weaker in its lower part.

On the upper part, next to the infrared port, is located the power button. Like the Nokia phones, it is also a shortcut for easy change of the port or entirely locking the keypad.
The cover of the slot for the external antenna is in orange and reflects, which allows it to be used as a mirror for self-portrait taking with the camera of the phone. On the lower right angle there is a hinge on which can be hooked up the neck-band for carrying the phone.

Interface:

The interface is kept the same as the previous models. The main menu is in a grid format with 3x4 icons, such as for each one there is a shortcut key from the keypad (1 for the upper left, 2 for the upper middle, etc.). The sub-menus are shown in a list format, having different tabs, which can be changed with the left-right buttons. There as well can be used digit-key shortcuts, but the rows are not numbered and that is uncomfortable. For a background image of the home screen can be used animations, which “move” the screen around even in a stand by regime.

By default is loaded the Walkman style orange theme, but there are a few more available. The new with the themes is that besides the background in the different menus, they can change the icons as well. The pre-loaded Emerge and Orbit do that, being variations of one another – in grey and black. On movement in the main menu with “Emerge” there is a “trail” left, and with Orbit there is a light following the cursor. With both themes the color of these additional graphics changes on a second entry in the menu. The other interesting thing about the new themes is that you have the option of personalizing the menu grid in a different style that the regular 3x4 icons – an example for that is the “Equalizer” theme, which changes the menu entirely, making it a list, which can be scrolled from left to right (and the other way) with large animated icons for the different menus.

Phonebook:

The phone book is the same like the previous models. It can store up to 1000 contacts, such as every one of them can have up to 5 numbers, 3 emails and 1 web address. The additional fields are full postal address, job title and an info field for additional notes, as well as a birthday field, which can add a notification in the calendar for the selected date to remind you for that. For each contact a personal melody can be added and a picture to be used as a notification on an incoming call. It is uncomfortable that the pictures are not shown in the contact list the way phones like Motorola do it.

Unlike the previous versions, when one voice dial tag was recorded and the phone asked which type of number to dial (mobile, home, etc.), now the adding of a voice tag is done for each number separately, such as on adding it shows the type of number to attach the command to. The only commands that the phone supports are for incoming calls – you can either answer or reject the call with “busy”. The recording of the voice tags needs to be done in a quiet room, or the phone will tell you that it is too noisy. The results of the tests we did are not optimistic in any way – we recorder voice tags for 7 of the contacts. From 14 attempts to voice dial, which were carried on in a quiet room, 6 were successful and 8 were unsuccessful, which is only 40% success rate. The only other option for voice dialing is Magic Word, which allows you when using a corded headset to select one word which when spoken turns the voice dialing automatically on. Overall the voice dialing has very limited options in regards to other brands of phones which have features like speaker-independent dialing, speech to text, text to speech, extended voice commands and digit dialing.

So, if you have 5 numbers for 1 contact, you will have to add 5 voice tags. Speed dialing can be set for 9 numbers, which must be already added to the phonebook. To speed dial in standby regime you will need to press the speed dialing number and then the green headphone. If held the phone automatically brings you to the selected letter in the phonebook. The searching of the contact list is done the same way, such as you cannot search for a word after the first one – by second name for example. The groups are used to send messages to many people at once and cannot have common pictures or melodies.

Synchronising is the method you'd need to use if transferring contacts from outlook or another mobile phone/PDA that doesn't support sending/receiving all contacts by bluetooth. Synchronising we found more of a task as the field formats used on SE phones are different to other manufacturers and even Microsoft outlook. This means that if you have numbers in some fields that the W810 does not recognise, they will not be copied. It took me about us hour transferring contacts from a Nokia 6230i to the W810 after synchronising the two with outlook, as we had to go through each contact and manually edit all the excluded numbers. Not a great experience.

You can copy all numbers from your sim to phone or vice-versa as long as you have sufficient memory in either direction of your chosen destination. You can also assign nine speed dials excluding voicemail in your phonebook.  

PIM:

The W810i has only 1 alarm, which cannot be set for every day automatically or just for selected days, which is quite simple and relatively uncomfortable.

The calendar can be looked at for the entire month or for a week. The days that have set appointments are bolded, and the adding of new appointments is done by selecting a certain day and saving the time, duration, subject, location and reminder.

In Tasks can be added additional, different from the ones in the calendar, having a time setting as well. Short (and not such) notes can be added in Notes.

The calculator does simple calculations, but the interface is not very comfortable, since the actions are performed by moving left-right and confirming with the d-pad. The other standard options are Stopwatch and Timer. The first one can record up to 9 timings (laps) and the Timer is set for backward counting with an alarm for the notification.

“Light” uses the flash-light of the camera for a pointed light, and it can be set for different regimes of operation: On, Off, On for 1 minute & SOS – such as the last one spells SOS in the Morse alphabet.

Memory:
The phone has 20 MB of available memory, which can be increased using the port for Memory Stick PRO Duo cards, such as the pre-packaged one with 512 MB of memory. The port is located on the left side of the phone covered by a black plastic cover, to protect it. A “hot-swipe” for the cards is supported and it is not necessary to turn the phone off when replacing them.

Messaging:

The messages are the standard for the brand, such as the inbox holds both SMS and MMS. When typing a new message a template can be used and creating a new template is easy. A selection for either SMS or MMS is done, and in the case of MMS you can add pictures and sounds to the template as well. When adding large pictures the phone can decrease them so they can be sent. Both saved and “just” taken pictures can be used.

The entering of the text is done using T9, and working with it is fast, easy and comfortable. It supports different languages, and new words can be added to the dictionary.



The W810 can also send and receive emails as it has a POP3/IMAP4 client protocol. The set up of this is quite simple as long as you have your current settings from your ISP. You can add multiple attachment types. You can also customise most settings in this menu like receiving the header only or full message (header & text). There is also a ‘check interval' feature which I find useful. When set, this will automatically poll for any new messages at a set interval ranging from 5 minutes right up to 12 hours. This, if set to a low interval time can add a lot of data charges to your bill, but with 512mb per month from our network provider, we allow it to poll for messages every hour and therefore have new emails delivered straight to us, quite similar to ‘push email technology' - handy if you need to read emails throughout the day.

‘My Friends' is a new feature that works very similar to instant messaging. You can send ‘real time' messages between fellow contacts that are currently online. We used this feature briefly using a msn account via GPRS. It worked fairly well and allowed us to change the online status that other contacts saw, as well as creating a chat group. Setup of this service is relatively simple as long as you have an existing instant messaging account.

Connectivity and Data:
For transferring music from a computer to the phone we connected it with the USB cable from the package of the W810. In Windows XP it is recognized without drivers as a mass storage device and transferring music is done by simply copying and pasting it. Strangely even with the USB2.0 connection it was slow as HELL. We transferred 426 MB for 35 minutes, which is about 210 KBps.

Through Bluetooth we connected the W810 with Jabra BT250 easily and through the headphone was done voice dialing. The transfer with other devices was again with no problems such as the speed with another Sony Ericsson (K750) was relatively fast.

Internet:
The Internet Browser loads standard pages, but the low resolution of the screen (176x220) makes the pages, which are not made for displaying in phones, hard to use and uncomfortable. A good new addition is the EDGE support, which is much faster than the standard GPRS.

Camera:
The camera is located on the back of the phone, such as it has 2 LED lights next to it, which are used as flash-lights, and the cover of the port for the external antenna is a mirror and helps for self-portrait taking.

The camera is turned on by holding the dedicated key on the right side. After starting it (it loads for about 2-3 seconds after pressing the key) the key blinks in white (and not orange), and has 2 levels of pressing, since the camera does auto focusing. The module is the same as the previous models (K750, W800) and does not use the new xenon flash-light or CyberShot branding, which were presented with the K790/K800 models.
Different options are available such as macro and night pictures, different effects are supported (B&W, Negative, Sepia, Solarize) and different setting such as quality of the pictures, as well as white balance and compensations can be adjusted. It has 4 options for a shutter sound, but we did not find a way to stop it, so that the camera doesn't give us away when taking pictures.



The camera is quite fast, such as after taking a picture you can move to another one by pressing the shutter button again. The saving of the picture and moving to the next one took us about 5-6 seconds at the highest resolution. In most cases the camera focused fine, even in dark situations, since the flash-light is light up all the time and it allows the camera to auto focus.

Overall the quality of the pictures that came out of the W810 did not satisfy us. Even with the high resolution they do not look good on the computer and have an unpleasant view. The outdoors pictures are often over exposured, and besides that are over sharpened and artifacts are easy to spot. The macro is relatively good for a phone, when it is taken at strong light. The colors are real, but in lighter pictures they are slightly yellow shaded.

With indoors pictures the noise is far more than the allowed. Even with strong light, there are noticeable noises even in the light areas of the picture. Happily the phone managed to take pictures even in complete darkness thanks to the integrated flash-light, but the quality was not good. From 3 feet the pictures are bearable even with the lots of noise, and from 9 feet the captures are of very bad quality.

Indoor	Indoor+Flash	Bright Lightning
Bright Lightning+Macro	Complete Darkness - 9 feet	Complete Darkness - 3 feet

The largest resolution of the camcoder is 176x144 pixels, which is definitely not a high-res video. The produced files were crappy and are good for watching them only on phones.

Audio:
One of the main things about the W810 and the entire Walkman line is the music. When turning the phone on there are two options – phone or only music player. The second one has access only to the Walkman menu of the phone.

It gives the option of choosing from the available music by an artist, as well as separate songs, which can be added to different playlists and arranged the way you want them. There is a lack of sorting options (by album, or by genre) similar to the iPod for example. There also is a lack of option for searching, similar to the phonebook, and having one in both places would be quite comfortable. Different options like shuffle and loop can be turned on, as well as different preset equalizers or a manually adjusted one. The same player plays video where full screen view is available.

The phone is pre-packaged with Walkman plug-in headset. Since it has the 3.5 mm standard jack, which is plugged in the headset and then in the phone, we easily plugged the headphones in a standard music player – in our case the iPod Nano – the conclusion is that the “high quality” Walkman headset is not of that high quality after all – the middle & treble frequencies are quite weakly played such as the sound is irritating. Otherwise it has quite a high peak in some of the bass frequencies, which makes the listening unpleasant overall.

Besides that the phone has an FM Radio tuner which in order to operate needs to have cable headset plugged in, which is used as an antenna. Favorite stations can be stored for later access. The radio and the player as well can work in the background while the phone is used for other things (except talking on it).

JAVA:
W810 supports JAVA MIDP2.0 where the phone is pre-loaded with 2 games. One of them is in Tetris style. The loading is fast and with no problems with the smaller applications and an adequate speed with larger ones.

Most of today's phones come with some type of software which is used to synchronize the mobile phone with a desktop PC. The current version of the Sony Ericsson Pc suite we tested is v. 1.10.176.

During the installation, several language options are available. The actual application consists of four parts which can be selectively installed. The PC suite allows synchronization of contacts, notes and file transfer. The Adobe Photoshop Album SE is used to store and edit pictures taken with the phone. The QuickTime application is used for viewing video and audio files.

The Disc2Phone software is used to search for music in the user computer or audio CDs, convert audio tracks to MP3 format and copy tracks to a Sony  Memory Stick for listening on the phone. In order for Disk2Phone to work, the phone must be restarted and put in File Transfer mode in which most phone features don't work which of course is very annoying.

Switching back to Phone mode again involves restarting of the phone. Unlike Motorola's PC suite, Sony Ericsson one does not allow the user to compose and send messages from the PC. The contacts, notes, calendar and to-do lists can be synchronized, but unlike the Moto's software, the information can not be managed from the PC (edit, delete, add), just synchronized. Also, the only bulk synchronization is allowed, whereas with Motorola allows the user only selected contacts to be synchronized.

The Image Editor allows the user to do basic manipulation on images stored on the PC and then upload them on the phone. The options include zooming, brightness, contrast and color management.

The MMS Home Studio offers an easy and fast way for creating multimedia messages including backgrounds, text, sounds, pictures and animation. The ready MMS can not be sent directly from the PC, but again must be downloaded to the phone first and then sent from it.

The File Manager simply launches a Windows Explorer and allows the user to browse the store images, sounds or videos on the Phone's internal memory or on the Memory card.

The last feature is the Mobile Networking Wizard. In a nutshell, it allows the user to use its mobile phone's data capabilities to connect a PC or laptop to the internet. Depending on the settings, the user can select either the slower circuit switched data (CSD / HSCSD) or packet data such as GPRS / EDGE / 3G.

Overall, Sony Ericsson PC suite functionality is limited and only features worth mentioning are the basic synchronization and MMS composition.

Performance:
Overall the W810 works very fast without almost any slowing down while browsing through the menu; it is very responsive and on a good level. There is a little wait when starting heavier applications such as the Walkman player, the FM Radio or the Camera, but the wait is definitely not annoying.

The signal strength is one of the strong sides of the W810. During the test it did not loose the network nor did it drop a call even in areas with lower than the regular signal.

The sound on the other side is not that good. In happened that during a call, even in not a very noisy environment, it was hard to hear our caller or we were hearing so low, that it was hard to understand what was said. We even considered using the speakerphone in order to manage a phone call. In a noisy environment that is almost impossible without using a headset. The speakerphone is relatively strong and with a good clear sound without much extra noise. The sound level of the melodies, as well as the sound of the music playback is strong and the music sounds good, and the vibration is there so that you do not miss a call even in a noisy environment.

The battery life is good. During our tests it held for 3 days of lots of usage of the phone and its menus, taking pictures with the camera, using the Bluetooth and lots of playback of music through the speakerphone. During more normal usage the battery held for 4 days, which is not little at all for such a class of phones. The charging is done by using the charger or the USB connection to the computer.

Conclusion:
Similar to its predecessor, the W810 bets mainly on the multimedia options - the music player and the camera, without leaving behind the business applications such as the pleasant phone book and a fairly good organizer. In relatively small sizes it includes not bad options, but sadly it keeps the same display and camera like the W800, and it would be better to use newer and higher quality modules. Sadly it has a few drawbacks that take away from the good impression, such as the make, the level of the sound during calls and a not very functional music player. Overall the W810 is one good multimedia phone with both pleasant design and options.

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As always, if you are interested in becoming part of our review team, drop me an email at: kidoborg@phonearena.com

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

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