I know I know this is a quite old phone now, so why review? Well one reason is I'm to review Nokia 5800 Xpress Music so this will be kind of comparison to that. Other reason as you may have just imagined, is to fill the blog!! Anyway as there are enough reviews by websites are available, I'm not going to go through all the technical details or features. But I will focus on features that I use and impressions I got through use over a long period of time.
Sony as we know is a global leader in portable entertainment. Their 'Walkman' brand is legendary with its portable radios, cassette players, cd players and mp3 players from very old days. So its no surprise when Sony-Ericsson merge wanted to challenge the market, they used their best warrior- Walkman brand. It’s a fact that Sony-ericsson's mobile phone market is hugely dependant on their Walkman brand. One reason for that is, couple of years back there wasn’t much phones in the market aimed specifically at the music scenario. All were happy with their iPod on the pocket. Talking of iPod, it was a real threat for Sony's walkman line. Maybe Sony wanted their revenge ;) they came up with phones carrying Walkman logo. Some of the first ones were W700, W800. So the 'W-series' was born. It really paid off because young people liked the idea of integration, and carrying one device for all the needs. With the introduction of W810 in the time of Sony Ericsson K750 which was a major hit, able to grab a good market share. W810 was helped by the fact that it was as good as K750 without some of the problems of K750 like the troublesome joy stick. Then came the successor of W810, the W610.
So W610 had the hard job of living up to its predecessor from the beginning. Anyway I will try to remember why I chose W610 over W810 in a time both were available.
It had Walkman player 2.0
It was new, so kind of cool
It was a great design, with elegance over the plasticky body of W810
Had a better looking screen
Thinness
80MB internal memory
But, there were few bad as well comparing with W810:
Has a not that good camera -W810 had one of the best phone cameras of the time
Has M2 memory cards -W810 used more cheap 'Memory stick Duo' which can also use m2 cards with an adapter.
Anyway I'm happy that I chose W610 because I am not a person that use phone camera much. So camera was not that much of problem to me. M2 memory was an upset but after sometime it came down in price. It’s also said to be faster than memory stick duo.
Also was the fact that W810 was a small but thick phone, with a plastic look. But W610 is more of a looker, its 'Plush orange' color is more 'look at me!' With stylish keys which proved to be a bit hard to use for messaging, they are a bit too thin. It will take sometime to get used to them. It’s a very compact phone so easy to carry around with you. Its thin body made its impossible to add a good camera lens as in W810. So the image quality is reduced a bit.
Screen of W610 is similar to W810 but with its improved firmware it looks better and especially texts are displayed much better. Maybe it’s the fonts, it looks smooth. Pixels are hard to see so overall it’s a good screen. But at 1.96 inches it’s a bit smallish compared to most Nokia and other brands models. In the sunlight it is a bit hard to read, Nokia seem to be better on that department. But with ‘Flash Themes’ support its able to customize the menu and the looks. But funny thing is Sony Ericsson had made it very hard to add flash themes to the phones. It’s almost as if flashing the phone to add new flash support themes.
Then the Walkman player 2.0 it’s a great bit of application to use, especially at a mid end phone audio player. It has ID3 tag reading ability, it scans the phone for new mp3 and waves automatically. So don’t need to wait till it’s updated. Songs are categorized in Artist, Album, Song name, Composer and Genre. Making playlists is a breeze. You can just queue new songs to the ‘Now playing’ playlist. So no need to make a new playlist all the time. It also supports Album Arts, so embedded art is displayed while playing the song. Only thing is the art is displayed in a small box. 512MB m2 card is not that enough if you’re a music junkie like me, but it can be used with a m2 card up to 2GB. In the music department this phone really beats most competitive if not all. It has a mono speaker as the loud speaker, but comes with really good quality stereo Walkman in-ear phones, HPM-70. With walkman player’s ‘Mega Bass’ effect, it gives very good bass as well. Because its in-ear phones, it blocks most outside noises. So it can be used to listen to music in a crowded bus or a train. One special service to be mentioned is the ‘TrackID’ app. It is an application that records about 10 seconds of some music and sends to the server to identify the track. It will give the Song name, Artist and other album details in seconds. It was almost 100% accurate for the songs I have used, but it only capable of finding international songs of English and Hindi only. Good thing is it can be used even if the source music quality is very low or mixed with other noises. Battery life is also good, its will able to handle couple of days without a charge doing usual things.
Even it’s not a smart phone, as most Sony Ericssons, its able to minimize applications and multi task. It only supports java apps so not going to give all the freedom of a smart phone. But it has a very good processor that’s able to handle many programs at once. I once opened about 6 apps at once including opera mini browser, ebuddy IM app and music player. They all worked well, didn’t hang or anything. User interface is considerably fast, I don’t switch off the phone for months, and it just works without any glitch. But few times I had to restart it due to corrupted display of images. But after a restart it works fine. I used it for browsing web and chatting most of the time. Opera mini is a great little browser to use. It handles websites very well. Only thing is the phones 1.96inch screen is tiny for surfing web. With 176x220 resolution the text were easy to read. ‘EDGE’ capability meant good surf speeds usually.
Thing I missed in the phone mainly was a bigger screen. If you’re into surfing net it’s a must. Then the lack of video calling, it came in the time where 3g devices were emerging. Now it’s the time of 3.5G, so video calling was getting to Sri Lanka very fast. Tiny keys of the phone also did worry me.
Some people think Sony Ericsson is not as good as Nokia, but in some ways its better than Nokia. Music can be considered one such field. But with new Xpress Music range of Nokia it’s a very close call.
If you want specifications and features of mobile phones, use: www.gsmarena.com (really good)
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