Camera Phones Plaza

Sony Ericsson announced the W300 back in February of 2006. It was the seventh Walkman phone in the series that focuses on a great music experience on top of a mobile phone. Along side of the Sony Ericsson W600 and the W810i, which are the higher-end models in the series, the W300i comes in a compact clamshell form with the Walkman music hardware controls, support for a wide variety of music formats and a Memory Stick Micro expansion slot.

This quad-band GSM world phone sports EDGE for data, a VGA camera, an integrated FM radio, stereo audio, Bluetooth, Java for 3D gaming and syncing to desktop via PC Suite. That’s a sweet laundry list for a feature phone that sells for an affordable price. Cingular will likely announce this phone at CTIA around September 12, 2006 in the US. If you can’t wait or prefer another GSM carrier, you can buy the phone directly from Sony Ericsson’s web site for $299 unlocked, which means you can pop in your own SIM to use it.

MobileTechReview made a review of this phone and here are some of their impressions: Sony Ericsson pleased us with the W810i’s great camera quality that could rival some high-end Nokia camera phones. Alas the W300i is a lower end phone and has only a VGA camera with 4x digital zoom. The picture quality is quite good by VGA camera standards. You will notice a bit of the usual VGA camera phone noise in photos, but the color saturation is very good and colors are more balanced compared to many other VGA cameras, though it has a slight pink color tint.

You can turn up the brightness for poorly lit areas but you will get some whiteout on reflective surfaces and white objects in your pictures. The camera can take still photos at 640 x 480, 320 x 240 and 160 x 120 resolutions. It has two picture quality settings and several shooting modes including normal, panorama, frames and burst mode. All the sample photos are taken in Fine quality at 640 x 480 resolution.

The W300i’s camera can also take videos with audio in 3gp format and you can take video at either 176 x 144 or 128 x 96 resolution. The video quality is good for a VGA camera with no blocky distortion or frame jumps and the audio is in sync with the video.

The conclusion is that the Sony Ericsson W300i is a very capable feature phone that’s easy to use and small enough to live in any pocket. The full Walkman treatment makes it easy to use the phone as a casual music player, though it can’t compete with iPod’s higher music storage capacity and even better fidelity. If you are looking for an affordable GSM clamshell phone with good phone features and connection capabilities, you should give the W300i a look, especially if music is your thing.


Read full review here.