Another year flying by, gave up smoking in Jan to become a fitness freak have to work on this 5.30 a...
Another year flying by, gave up smoking in Jan to become a fitness freak have to work on this 5.30 am gym lark though.
Member since:07.09.2004
Reviews:103
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INTRO I recently managed to persuade my wife to upgrade her phone to the W880. Already being happy with her phone she gave it to me. At the time I thought this was fantastic but now I am not so sure.
SONY PHONES I rate Sony Ericsson phones at the top of the pile of the decent makes. They always have excellent build quality and the menus are functional and easy to use. I have progressed through the current range as and when they have come out. So it was with joy that I received one of the new W880iphones
W880i FIRST IMPRESSIONS When I go the phone I was well impressed. The one I got was from Vodafone who generally don't go to town creating fancy packaging but instead give you the good old RED cardboard box just in case you forget what network your on.
When you take the W880i out of the box you realise just how compact the phone actually is. I also have a K800 from Sony and reckon that if you glued together 3, yes 3 W880 phones together you would match the size of the k800. So in the W880 we have a tiny phone.
As we all know though, size isn't everything so is the W880i any good? Well build quality wise and on looks, yes it most defiantly is. It looks like someone actually sat down and milled out the front cover by hand, the facia is perfectly formed and the buttons and screen merge in well, rather like a good photograph. I got the black phone which is black all round the front
and orange on the rear. The rear is also covered with some kind of anti slip rubbery stuff, which does prove to be useful due to the compact size of the phone. I believe they also sell the phone in a chrome finish if your into that kind of thing.
WHAT YOU GET IN THE BOX Well apart from the phone you get the usual standard extras, charger, earpiece, software CD and a data cable. Nothing much to write home about here I guess.
USING THE PHONE I didn't find using the phone to be to difficult. One thing you will notice is that they keys are on the small side. Well actually on the tiny side. If your going to squash the phone down to be that small then I guess you have to make some compromises. If you have bigger hands you may find the phone buttons difficult to work. I didn't find it to bad to use but did notice a certain slowing when I was trying to send out a text message. Whilst I am on the point of small buttons its worth pointing out that they are in fact raised buttons and not flat to the front of the phone. Not a problem I hear you cry. Well maybe it is. I have seen another W880 which was only a week old. The guy placed it in his jeans pocket and ripped the star key out as it caught on the way in. There was no way to fix it and the button was so small it got lost……On hearing this and seeing the damage to his phone I checked mine and it is pretty clear that the buttons move around a lot and are not well held in to place.
Making a call from the phone is as simple as all other SE phones, 1,2,3 and your done. During a call there is a good range of volume control but it starts to limit there. The speaker / earpiece is tinny in sound and due to the phones slim design you tend to get plenty of interference if its windy, which gets very annoying.
They have dumped the old joystick in favour of a sort of 4 way pad effort but to be honest I think the flawed joystick was better. The button on the pad is to small to allow you to press it directly. Its easy to press the directional buttons by accident.
CAMERA The next thing that truly annoyed me about the phone was the camera. I wasn't to bothered about the camera but did want a minimal standard so that I could take a few point and shoot shots whilst out walking or in the hills. It wasn't something I checked before getting the phone as you would expect that on a high end phone of this kind that you would get the Sony minimum specs seeing as they are so good at making cameras. Well I hate to say it but you don't. The camera is useless. 2 mega pixels is enough but the camera is missing basic requirements to get a basic quality picture. Firstly there is no auto focus. If you take a snap of anything other than a single fence post then its going to come out blurred, believe me, I have tried and failed with the W880i. Secondly, there is no antishake feature. How many people do you know that can hold a tiny camera like this for more than a few seconds and manage to keep it still. I couldn't do it, this combined with no auto focus makes for an appalling photograph, rather like the ones I used to take on a free digital camera I got from a magazine about 10 years ago. Thirdly there is no flash. Even the W800 phone had a basic LED to light up the subject. Fourthly the camera option has a self timer. Oh my…..what a waste of time. Useless. The phone is 9.4mm thick. How on earth are you meant to balance a phone that thin, set the timer and leave it on a wall to take a photo on its own without it blowing over…..answer, you cant, tried it………….. So if you have a spare sealed room with a wall and 30 bright strip lights with a photo subject that resembles a fence post and have a hand as steady as the QE2 then you'll get a good photo…..
I lined up my W880 with my K800 for a few different comparison shots. I wasn't able to get a single photo from the W880 that I thought I could actually use. I realise it would never come close to the K800 but wanted just a basic snap to say, yes that's quite good…..didn't happen.
MP3 player As an MP3 player the W880 is fantastic. You get the Sony upgraded version 2 software which is by far better than V1. Selecting songs and creating playlists is very easy as is navigating to new tracks when you want to change. The V2 walkman software also lets you attach album art to the songs, but I have to say that this seems a little pointless on a phone with a small screen and is probably more trouble than its worth. Being a true Walkman phone the W880 comes with some good sound effects including their patented Mega Bass. Over the earphones this sounds good. Playing music through the speaker is pretty bad though. The phones slim design means the speaker isn't big enough to get any decent music definition. The phone comes with a 1GB M2 memory card as standard which is more than enough to get 250 odd songs on to, creating a decent enough playtime. Overall I would rate the phone as an MP3 above an IPOD even though the W880 is a little bigger than the IPOD Nano.
OTHER SOFTWAREs I wont go in to the in's and outs of the phones menus, they are as per most Sony phones. The phone does come with 6 or 7 games but these are all demo games (on Vodafone). You can only play them for a couple of levels and then they time out asking you to buy them. Other than the games you get the usual useless world clock function………woooohaaaarr.
SUMMARY Functionally as a phone and for design I would rate this phone quite highly. However, when you get down to business you can see the phone for what it really is. Rubbish. Its pretty clear that Sony are trying out the W880 on the market as a tester for things to come. They are testing out the Thin line set of phones and looking at the IPOD ideas to boot. I think the concept is fine but they have missed the point here and undone all of the work and progress on previous phones with this half baked effort that hasn't risen. The W880 is a 3G phone and does have a camera for this but with the tiny screen this is somewhat useless. With the reduction in size you loose the camera, flash, autofocus, speaker quality and some screen size and to date I struggle to see what in fact you gain. OK this is more of a walkman than a camera but why have a camera at all if its this bad. If you want a good all round phone avoid this one, there are easily better ones out there. If you want a slim line phone that just works then again avoid this phone, there are many others out there for lesser prices than this that do it just as well. I have left a few summary points below for you interest, or not if you havn't read this far. I think mine will be hitting EBAY very shortly. Oh, and recpetion isnt so good either, I lost on average 2 bars over my K800 standing in the same place. Forget about trying to receive a 3G coverage too.
Key Features: GPRS, GSM 1800, GSM 1900, GSM 900DesignMobileDigital Camera2 Megapixels Digital Camera Display: Display Size240 x 320Screen Type262K Colors (TFT) Memory: 16MB internal, 1GB memory stick M2 external Technical: Bluetooth, USBInput Method4-Way Navigation Pad, KeypadTalk Time6.5 HoursStandby Time425 HoursDigital Camera Resolution2 Megapixels Other Features: MMS, SMS FormatsHTML, MIDP2, UMTS Dimensions: Height 10.2 cm Width 4.6 cm Depth 1 cm Weight70.9 g MiscellaneousColor black / orange or silver
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Apr 11th, 2007
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