Jogja Ponsel

The Sony Ericsson W800i Walkman doesn’t throw in MP3 playback as a bonus like most other multimedia phones. This refreshingly compact candybar-style handset is obsessed with delivering a music experience that’s good enough to leave your iPod Shuffle at home, as evidenced by the dedicated Music buttons and an intuitive user interface that keeps 150 of your favorite tracks organized and within easy reach. Because the W800i isn’t being sold by a carrier (you can get it through www.sonyericsson.com or Sony Style retail stores), you’ll pay a sky-high $499 and have to bring your own service. Yet, when you throw in a sharp two-megapixel camera, FM radio, and Bluetooth, there’s no mobile multitasker that offers more for the money.

Unlike other phones stuffed with the same amount of features, the stylish white-and-orange W800i is the same size and weight as most voice-only handsets, which is a pretty amazing feat. It weighs 3.5 ounces and measures 3.9 x 1.8 x 0.8 inches. We’re not a fan of the stiff dialpad, but the W800i is as pocket-friendly as they come, and it sports a crystal-clear 262,000-color display.

There are several visual cues that tell you this is no ordinary cell, starting with a Direct Music button above the tiny joystick that launches the media player. Then there’s the Play/Pause button on the left spine; it’s a nice touch, but having the volume controls moved to the right spine is a little disorienting at first.

With 34MB of built-in memory and a 512MB Memory Stick Pro Duo card included (expandable up to 2GB), this handset won’t replace a hard drive jukebox, but it has the chops to replace a flash-based MP3 player and lighten your gadget load. If a call comes in, you can either accept it, which pauses music playback until your conversation has ended, or simply ignore it. We like that you can keep listening to tunes and adjust the volume while you’re in other applications, whether it’s the calendar or even a game.

To get your MP3s on the W800i, Sony Ericsson bundles a copy of its Disc2Phone software, which rips CDs and enables drag-and-drop transfers of existing tracks to the phone using the included USB cable. Navigating your collection on the phone is a cinch; within the Now Playing menu, for example, you can select Artists, Tracks, Playlists, and Videos with a click, and a slick white box highlights whatever option you’ve selected using the joystick.

In terms of sound quality, the W800i blows other multimedia phones out of the water. We cranked up Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound” all the way and the audio fidelity easily rivaled most standalone MP3 players when using the supplied stereo earphones. There are five equalizer settings from which to choose, but the Mega Bass option provided the richest sound and deepest bass. Even without the earphones plugged in the mono speaker on, the W800i supplied a surprising amount of volume, certainly enough for a quiet bedroom or hotel room.

We really like the W800i’s music-only mode, which you can enter when powering up the phone. This gives you a whopping 30 hours of playback and is ideal for when you’re on a flight. Expect about 15 hours of music playback in phone mode.
To further enrich the listening experience, the bundled headphones have a built-in FM antenna. An FM tuner is usually a throw-away feature, but the W800i makes the most of it with strong reception (at least in New York City) and unique support for radio data service feeds, which means you can see the artist name and song title as the song is playing, like an MP3 player.

The W800i’s second strongest feature is its 2-MP digital camera, which in our tests captured images sharp enough to produce frame-worthy 4 x 6 prints most of the time. There was some fuzziness in a portrait shot, but otherwise we were quite pleased with the results. Most of the credit goes to the W800i’s autofocus lens, which you expose with a flick of a switch to automatically launch the camera. We also like the powerful photo light above the lens, which delivered the best indoor performance for a camera phone that we’ve ever seen.

Other than it’s rigid dialpad, we see only two real weaknesses with the W800i. The first is that you can’t listen to music wirelessly using a Bluetooth headset or headphones. Being able to swap songs with other Bluetooth phones and devices is a novelty, but it’s usually not worth the five or more minutes for each transfer.

The other issue is that you can’t purchase the W800i directly from a wireless carrier. This means that you won’t be able to benefit from any discounts or subsidies service providers typically offer. Instead, you’ll need to supply your own Cingular or T-Mobile SIM card.

By comparison, Sprint offers the Samsung A800, with an MP3 player and 2-MP camera, for $349. In our estimation, the W800i is worth the premium over the Samsung because it’s a lot more portable and offers a much more polished music experience.

The bigger question is how Sony’s offering will stack up against Motorola and Apple’s long-delayed iTunes phone, which will presumably have a striking design of its own and boast tight integration with the iTunes software, complete with support for Podcasts. Since we haven’t had an opportunity to see that device in the flesh, we can’t tell you which music-phone combo is better. We can only say that the Sony Ericsson W800i is a more than worthy contender.

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