Camera Phones Plaza

Sony Ericsson Walkman phones become stronger and stronger. Because no one wants to carry an MP3 player anymore and just use the phone for music, the producer with the best music phone will win in the multimedia phones competition.

The Sony experience with the classical Walkmans, whether they were using tapes or CDs, has made Sony Ericsson phones known as offering excellent quality sound. If you also add that Sony Ericsson W980i looks very good and that it makes you different from friends who walk around with the same kind of phones, I hope I convince you to take a look at what does this device have to offer. In particular, it has many features, some of them no longer found in other phones.

The phone is made from quality materials and is solid. The attention for details and the materials used show us that the device is expensive. On the exterior, W980i has a secondary screen of 176 x 176 pixels. Its role is to display when someone calls you, and to use it when listening to music, and for this, its size is more than sufficient. Under the screen, we have the touch-sensitive keys, which enable you to control the audio player functions (play, pause, forward, rewind, etc.).

The main screen has 2.2 inch and a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. On the left side, the phone has the FastPort, which is for the USB cable, for the charger and for the headset. Sony Ericsson uses Fastport on almost all the new phones. Until now, the problem was that you could not connect more than a single enhancement to the Fastport, so you could not listen to music or use the handsfree while the phone was charging. The new Charger is a Fastport turn, so you can connect the charger and the headset in parallel. On the right side, we find the volume control key, a button that lets you choose what to see on the outside screen (the music player or the FM radio for example) and a button which locks the keyboard. A clamshell phone does not usually need keyboard locking, but In Sony Ericsson W980i case, this was necessary because it has those touch-sensitive keys on the outside.

It is medium size, small enough to consider it ideal for movies and for surfing the Internet. However, you will be able to do these things occasionally. I liked the quality of the screen, colors are vivid, the contrast is good and the text and pictures seem to be very clear. In strong sunlight, the screen remains readable. The image gallery is well done and it is a pleasure to use it. The images appear to be very clear and the colors are vivid. It has all kinds of pleasant effects at the transition between the images, on the opening and closing of the gallery. W980 has an accelerometer so the screen will automatically turn horizontally and you will see pictures in full screen mode.

W980 is a true music phone. The Walkman Player 3.0 is very good, and it sorts music files by artist, album and genre. It has an equalizer, my favorite function, which lets you increase the volume of the bass. The Album Art function shows you the cover of the CD, and other images related to the song you are listening, during the time music plays. If you minimize the player though, you will see on the main screen of the phone the name of the song that you are listening to at that moment.

Even with the flip closed, you can use the external keys to control the player. Furthermore, the phone accelerometer allows you to change the song with a simple move to the front or to the back. The function is called Shake control and can even be used to play all songs randomly. For that, it is enough to shake the phone a little.

Another nice function that Sony Ericsson has included on Walkman phones is SenseMe. To each song it is associated a certain tempo and a certain mood. Depending on your mood, you choose the tempo and the mood, and your phone will play all songs that match your mood. In order to use SenseMe, you have to associate the songs a certain tempo and a certain mood. This association is made using the Media Manager software, which you install on your PC and which you use to copy the songs to your phone. If you have songs on your phone that you downloaded without Media Manager, you cannot manually assign to them a tempo and a mood.

The Video Player is reasonable. Sony Ericsson W980i's screen is not big enough to see a movie in very good condition. However, if you only watch short videos, than the screen is good. I like the fact that the phone is able to make screenshots of videos, which saves them as images. You can do this on other phones too, but you need separate software. However, on Sony Ericsson W980i this function is integrated in the video player.

It has an integrated FM transmitter. This means that you can transmit radio music from the phone. How could that help? In the car, you can listen to your phone music directly from the radio without needing any cable for that. FM transmitters are found in stores and are not expensive, but those usually let you transmit from a USB stick. The idea of transmitting using the phone seems much better, because you put music on your phone anyway.

The camera is a little weak. The only good utility that it has is for MMS. Besides the fact that it has only 3 megapixels, it has no autofocus and no flash.

If you will use a Sony Ericsson W980i for Internet surfing, you will not be sorry. You have the GPRS / EDGE / UMTS / HSDPA and WiFi connectivity, which means you have access to fast Internet both in GSM networks, as well as in the hotspot areas. The NetFront browser is one of the best browsers. The pages are rendered very fast, even if they are complex. They are arranged well to resemble with what you see on the computer. Exactly as in Symbian S60, you have a virtual mouse so you click links easier.

The Email Client is one of the most advanced clients. Besides the fact that it can sort messages by date or size, it knows how to work with attachments. You can extract attachments from emails and you can save them on your phone, even if Sony Ericsson W980i does not know these file types. The Email client supports email accounts with POP3 / IMAP and SMTP.

Sony Ericsson W980i has Bluetooth with A2DP version. That means you can connect a Bluetooth headset to your phone and you can listen to stereo music without being annoyed by wires.

Sony Ericsson W980i does not have applications like Mobile Office, so you cannot view or edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF files. It is possible to find some Java applications for some of them, at least for viewing them.

Sony Ericsson W980i is a phone made for music, so from this perspective it does its job very well. It comes with 8 GB of memory, so the space for music is not a problem. If you buy the phone for its sound quality than you are going to be happy. However, you must remember that the camera is very good. If you need to work with Word, Excel or PowerPoint files than this is not the phone for you, because it does not know how to open them.