Sony Ericsson W850i

The Sony Ericsson W850i is a Walkman-branded phone in a slide design. Available in either golden white or precious black, this phone measures 98 x 47 x 21mm and weighs 116g which, while not the smallest device around, is a reasonable size for the functionality it provides.

With its alphanumeric keypad concealed until slid out, the W850i presents the user with an array of navigational and selection keys positioned beneath the units 240 x 320 pixel 262K TFT color screen.

The Walkman series of phones have established a first-class reputation for music, and the W850i fully lives up to expectations. You can enjoy stereo sound from the music player or the FM radio with excellent audio quality and user-friendliness. The music player makes use of the Sony Walkman 2.0 platform with support for a range of popular file formats that include MP3, MP4, AAC, MIDI and WAV. The Mega Bass™ feature enhances bass frequencies and a good stereo headset is supplied in the sales package.

The W850i supports USB mass storage, which means that files can be easily and quickly transferred with a drag and drop operation.

The W850i is a tri-band GSM 900.1800/1900 phone with UMTS for 3G connectivity. The phone's 3G connectivity allows you to link to the Sony online music store to purchase tracks. Storage capacity for music tracks or other items is provided by the supplied 1GB Memory Stick Pro Duo card - this is expandable to 4GB.

The W850i is also a camera phone of course, and is equipped with a good quality 2 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom and flash. Again Sony Ericsson has taken the decision not to include a flash feature with the result that I often had to delete rather dark images or carry out major adjustments using the built-in image editing feature.  A second camera, VGA this time, is located above the main screen to provide face-to-face video calling with others using a similarly specified handset.

Battery life is estimated to be in the region of 9 hours with 400 hours being claimed for standby mode. This has got to be one of the best Walkman phones released so far, and that's saying a lot.