Sony Ericsson W810i music phone

Sony's Walkman phone heads for the dark side.

The orange-hued w800i was the best music phone of its day, but the colour scheme was an acquired taste. Sony obviously noticed, as its successor is basically the same phone, but black. It's an equally easy-to-use, intuitive phone/cam/Walkman, complete with 20MB of internal memory and a 512MB removable card, which can be upgraded to 2GB if you're a bit flash about your Flash.

Images come courtesy of a two-megapixel camera, which appears to have been slightly improved from the W800's excellent one. Sadly, the neat sliding lens cover has been ditched.

As you'd expect from Sony, Walkman sound quality is splendid. Turn on the Megabass function and the sirens and glam-rock basslines of The Sweet's Blockbuster really pummel your ears. Navigation is by artist or track, and you can make your own playlists. In fact, you have to, because it defaults to a playlist that includes all the phone's brain-meltingly awful ringtones. Noticeable gaps between tracks are the only other major pain.

Battery life is nominally eight hours talk time and 350 standby. We got about four days of use out of it, listening to music and talking for about an hour in total each day, plus texting and playing Mini Golf (best round, 21, since you ask).

Improvements over the W800 are few. It's quad-band, which means it now works in Hicksville, Idaho and as noted, photos seem fractionally clearer, while connecting by USB doesn't crash our iMac in the way that its predecessor did. On the down side, the new button lay-out, although more stylish, is slightly more fiddly than on the 800.
Overall, though, this is the W800i, only a bit better. And blacker. That'll do for now, to be honest.