Sony Ericsson W850i Walkman > Reviews (148)

Sony Ericsson W850I

I won this phone about 4 months ago at work. I gave it to my boyfriend but when he upgrades, I'm having the phone back. This phone is widely available on a contract, free on most tariffs but its quite price on Pay As You Go. Most new phones seem to be not available on PAYG or they are too expensive for my liking.

Note for some people that are commenting on that I have no personal experience with this phone. Wrong, I work in a mobile phone shop. I deal with the phone on a regular basis as a demo phone, show people how it works and what it does and also I used it for 2 weeks before I got my upgrade.

Price list on 02/01/07

Orange (at Carphone Warehouse) £209.95 Free Airtime of £10
3 £277.17 (sim free can be used on any network)
Vodafone £300 (retail stores only also sim free)

Overview of the phone

Design: It's a slide up

phone. It comes in white and black. It's quite a bulky phone but fairly light for its size. The screen is of a decent size and the keys big enough for most fingers and thumbs. The menu buttons are soft buttons, which gets some getting used to. This is a phone from Sony Ericsson's Walkman series.

Features: It's a 3G phone with a 2-megapixel camera. It's got all the mod cons like WAP, calendar, bluetooth, etc. The special thing about this phone, it was especially designed to play MP3s and also be a decent phone. It's quad-band phone. It has an internal memory of 16MB* and comes with a 1GB memory card.
* Internal memory can vary on different networks

A more detailed look at the phone

This phone is a Quad-Band phone, which means you can use it anywhere in the world as long as you can get a signal in the place that you're in.

This phone is a 2-megapixel camera. The same as the Samsung Z400 that I reviewed but the difference is amazing. It has 2.5x digital zoom but also photo light so when it's dark, you can put the light on and have decent picture. The quality of the pictures are lovely and transfer well onto the PC.
Also the light can be used for a torch in the dark. On those evenings, where my keys are the bottom of my handbag, I sure need this. It has a feature called Facewarp, the name says it all. You can warp the pictures with some funny results. Also there are a picture frames for example, angel with a hole where the face should so you can put your own or your friends instead.
The video quality is good and also transfers well the PC without blurring, freezing or pixelating.

The MP3 player is the best feature of the phone. With the newest Walkman software, it's the best Walkman phone Sony Ericsson have ever made. Just push the orange bar on the phone, your player just pops up. It does everything that a standard MP3 or Ipod does but in combination with a phone. The music quality is brilliant and with the 1GB memory, you can download many tunes. It plays various different music files like ACC and MP3. Also, this phone is enabled for radio so just plug in your headphones and voila. You can even see what radio station you're listening to and if you don't like it, just changing it!

The headphones' wires acts as your aerial. Both of these features, you can use while you use your phone (except for phone calls which is obvious really). So you can text away, while you listen to the radio or your favourite tunes that you've downloaded onto the phone.

The Bluetooth is great on this phone but it's slightly more special than some other phones' bluetooth as it has Bluetooth™ stereo (A2DP) and that allows you can Bluetooth your tracks to your friends or your headset and it still will be high-quality stereo music. It's also got infrared for the people that want or need. To be honest, I've never used infrared in my life.

The 3G on this phone is like on any other phone but I must say that the battery handles it well in our area, as we don't have completely coverage. . If you don't know what 3G is, its gives you the ability to make video calls (if the other person has a 3G phone and is in a 3G area), surf and download faster when using the WAP on your phone and watch mobileTV. My boyfriend keeps it on 3G all the time and his battery lasts 3 days still and he uses his mobile like a mad man sometimes. Lol

Text messaging is pretty straightforward on this phone (although I don't like the way Sony Ericsson's phones text. That's my personal choice.) There's predictive text, normal text and numbers. I'm afraid that I don't know how many text the phone holds as we couldn't find a counter but in a month, my boyfriend can send up to 800 text messages and he doesn't have to delete for at least a month. Though I wouldn't recommend it. Not deleting texts seems to make the phone sluggish and sometimes makes the phone go a little odd for some reason.
You can choose any tone to be your message tones but make sure it's not too long or it might drive you mad.
Pictures messages are easy to send too. Just make sure that the settings are correct, if not, go to the Sony Ericsson website to get the correct settings for your network provider.

There's Flightmode, which enables you to play music while you're on a plane. That's if the airline lets you take your phone on the plane and not request you leave it in your luggage.

As the phone is Java enabled, you can download all the latest games. Though of these games can also make the phone freeze. I don't know if that is down to the software on the phone or the programming of the game.

Other features on the phone are calendar, alarm, notes, tasks, converter, Stopwatch, Timer, voice recorder, File manager, and world clock. Other music related features are VideoDJ™, PlayNow™, TrackID™ and Music DJ™. Other Vodafone features are Vodafone Live and Mobile TV.

In the box, we got a USB lead, which connects to the PC. Works really well. You just install the software onto the PC, connect the phone and there you go. There's also Disc2Phone software, which transfers CD music to MP3 on your phone. With the other software, you can download songs onto your phone with ease and upload your pictures from your phone.

As I mentioned above, my boyfriend uses his phone all the time.

(yes, I do nag him about it). Compared to my phone and his old Motorola SLVR, the battery life on this phone is great. Every third day, he has to charge it but he sending more than 30 texts and at least 2 phone calls, mostly lasting between 45mins and an hour. The talk time on this phone is around 7 hours and standby time is 320 hours. Also non stop music through the Walkman player will last you 40 hours. All round it's got a great battery life that some people (mainly me with the rubbish battery life) envy.

Also if you're experience problems like freezing or the screen just going blank, you can download a software upgrade to your phone right from your PC. Just put in the USB lead, download the software and the phone has been upgrade. This saves it from having to go to repair and you losing your phone for a week or two. Or if you didn't get a lead in the box, you can do it through WAP and pay for the downloading of the software to your phone.

We have had to exchange the phone once though and this still hasn't sorted out the problem of freezing and unable to make phone calls when too many texts are stored on the phone. But now we think it might be the memory card corrupting it and it's nothing to do with the phone. Will update this review when I get the memory card looked at.

So what do I think of this phone? It's definitely better than the Samsung Z400. The phone is very easy to use and manuals are written quite well if you get stuck. It's great for music lovers and people have a lot of texts sent to them. The only real downside to the phone for some people is that it's slide and not flip, which means people break and scratch the screens easier.

I still think it's an amazing phone/walkman. I think it's more aimed at the male market than it being a girlie phone unless they bring it out in pink (had a lot of girls ask me if it comes in pink because as I work in a mobile phone shop). I haven't had many back for repairs at work, which makes it a good phone in my eyes but we will see how that develops over next couple of months because things can change.

Get rid of the Ipod and MP3 player and just buy this phone. I'd recommend this phone to anyone. Though get it on a contract if you can, its loads cheaper that way at the moment.