Sony Ericsson's Walkman phone for the masses gets a walkthrough. Check out our in-depth Sony Ericsson W350 review.
Review summary of the Sony Ericsson W350:
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 The Sony Ericsson W350 looks fantastic, but its performance doesn't quite live up. Perhaps we've been spoiled by the high-end Walkman experience we've had on other Sony Ericsson phones, like the Sony Ericsson W580i, but as a bargain phone, with a low-resolution screen and some flimsy hardware, the Walkman experience just doesn't work. We love the design, but when the tiny buttons and difficult controls make using the device more difficult, that love begins to wane. Worst of all, the Sony Ericsson Media Manager is the most difficult media transfer software we've used with a modern music phone, which makes the phone's prospects even more grim. In spite of the design, the phone packs some decent Web browsing and camera features, so its not a total wash, but if you're buying this phone for the music, you're probably better off investing just a bit more in a better Walkman phone, or looking elsewhere. Release: June 2008. Price: $1.
Pros: Attractive design. Easy to synch with Outlook contacts and calendar. Good camera. Fine Web browser.
Cons: Typing and navigation difficult, even in messaging and music functions. Media Manager is buggy and difficult to use. Music experience needs drastic improvement to match other Walkman phones.
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Full review of the Sony Ericsson W350:
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Design - Good
The Sony Ericsson W350 is a very polished, attractive looking phone. It uses a matchbook flip design, so the phone is basically a candybar with a cover for the keypad. It's not a common design, but we're not sure why, as this seems to solve a few problems people have with exposed keys, and Sony Ericsson has wisely made use of the external flap as well, placing some overlapping rings of music keys up out front. It's a gorgeous phone.
Unfortunately, once you get past the visual appeal, the phone can be very difficult to use. The external key layout is hardly intuitive, and in the Walkman app we often found ourselves flipping open the phone to get at the more advanced settings. Inside, the keys were tightly packed and extra slick, which made typing difficult. The 4-way navigation button is also clipped, so it's not even a full circle, and we frequently made incorrect selections because we had pressed down instead of the center, select button. It's a shame because the phone is stunning and slim, but it's design made usage much more difficult.
Calling - Good
Calls from the Sony Ericsson W350 sounded a bit muddy. Voices tended to sound deeper than in real life, and we got some irritating noise on the other end, like putting our ears to a conch shell. Thankfully, there were a few standout features that made the overall calling experience much better. First, we appreciate being able to synchronize our Outlook contact list with the phone. The address book on the W350 edged into smartphone territory, and even though we weren't fans of the keyboard, there was no need to type in a single address, thanks to the Sony Ericsson PC Suite. It's not the most reliable piece of software, but once we got it working it synchronized seamlessly.
Battery life on the Sony Ericsson W350 was also impressive, which is good news for callers as well as music fans. We managed a single call that lasted nearly 8 hours, which goes even beyond Sony Ericsson's 7 hour estimate. Using an AT&T SIM card, we had a constant 4 bars of EDGE service in our New York office.
Conference calling was no problem, and we paired easily with all our Bluetooth gear, but the phone comes up short in other calling features. There is no voice dialing for this device, which is too bad considering how difficult the tiny keys can make dialing. Also, the speakerphone was fairly quiet, while we like our music phones to blare a little bit.
Messaging - Good
The Sony Ericsson W350 covers the basic messaging options, with easy MMS and SMS messaging. Beyond the basics however, things get more difficult. Typing on the W350's thin keyboard was fairly difficult, though the phone uses a nice multi-tap implementation that makes it easy to pick out letters and symbols. None of the standard IM clients are present, not even AIM or Yahoo, though Sony Ericsson does include their own proprietary system, My Friends.
For e-mail, the W350 should support IMAP4 and POP3 accounts, but we had some trouble. There are no presets for popular e-mail services, so we had to enter all of our Gmail IMAP settings by hand, which includes some port adjustments and advanced setup. Even once we had double-checked our settings, the phone was unable to check our e-mail, and we suspect the network settings might be to blame. The phone had no trouble using the EDGE data connection for the Web, but choked when it came to messaging.
Music - Mediocre
Don't get us wrong, we're big fans of Sony Ericsson's Walkman phones. In fact, the Walkman app is easily on par with the iPhone's iPod app, when its done right. With the Sony Ericsson W350, however, we had some significant difficulties. Foremost, the Sony Ericsson Media Manager is abysmal. The software was very buggy, crashing frequently, and also painfully slow. Loading the files initially was slow and transferring the files to the phone was slow. Worst of all, the software didn't synchronize properly with the phone.
On the phone side, the Walkman player has never looked less polished than it did on the Sony Ericsson W350's low resolution screen. On better Walkman phones, like the Sony Ericsson W580i, the player is clean and modern looking. On the W350, however, it looks blocky and basic. Navigating the various menus was difficult with the controls, either with the internal navigation button or the external, dedicated music controls.
Finally, it's time Sony Ericsson abandoned the Pop Port proprietary connector. Sony Ericsson phones use this single port for both power and audio connections, which means that you must use the required adapter for standard headphones. The phone comes with a pair of headphones with a small cord, and we'll admit that it's convenient to have the microphone attachment combined with our own headphones. But we'd rather just have a 3.5mm headphone jack so we didn't have an extra meter or so of cord hanging off of us.
Camera - Good
For a 1.3-megapixel camera, the Sony Ericsson W350 takes pictures that were somewhat appealing, though not great. Colors looked good, and at lower zoom levels pictures had a very pleasant look. But at full crop, it was clear that some heavy noise reduction was dampening details, giving pictures a sort of pastel look. Edges were fuzzy and details hazy.
Glass and Steel
Our first sample is actually pretty good. The camera did a nice job with the bright blue sky, and the greens came out looking good as well. The leaves look like they were painted in oil, but overall it's still a nice pic.
Astor Place Cube
Again, we see good colors and lighting, but details are fuzzy. Especially at the edges, objects in this picture seem highlighted by fringing or an occasional black line.
Manhole Cover Ad
Perhaps this one is the best sample, since the details are hard to make out anyway. The shadows are a bit underexposed, but who needs to see that much of a manhole cover, anyway?
ViewMaster Tiger
With our old friend, the ViewMaster Tiger, we see that the Sony Ericsson W350 manages good color under our studio lights, but details are fuzzy. The edge of the ViewMaster isn't sharp, and the text underneath the clear plastic is completely illegible.
Web browsing - Good
For such a simple, music-centric phone, the browser on the Sony Ericsson W350 isn't terrible. It isn't up to the standards of, say, Nokia's N78, but this phone costs about a third of what that low-end Nseries phone costs. For simple browsing, the Sony Ericsson browser loaded our homepage in a full page layout with no trouble over the EDGE connection. A few of the images didn't make it, and some of the larger graphics, like our masthead, came out blocky. Still, scrolling the long pages was nice and smooth with the accelerating scroll function, and text looked sharp. It isn't a great browser, but we had fairly low expectations, and the Sony Ericsson W350 exceeded them in this regard.
Price and availability
The Sony Ericsson W350 is available now on AT&T Wireless. When purchased online, it'll be free with a two-year contract.
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