Sony Ericsson W550i

• Advantage:-

Good music and FM playback features, dedicated controls, music-only mode, supposedly 30-hour battery life, USB connectivity for drag and drop transfer, great 1.3 megapixel Camera

• Disadvantage:-

No sound in video recording, driver required for USB detection, no memory card/stick slot, free Ricky Martin promo CD

• Details:-

Phone manufacturers have been gradually adding new convergence features to their devices for a while now, with phones now doubling up as music players, movie players and even TV receivers and remote controllers. It could be an interesting debate if we were to discuss why a company such as Sony, one of the pioneers of portable audio (the Walkman?) brands, would take such a long time to turn a simple music-playing phone into a proper portable audio player and brand it a "Walkman phone". While you try and ponder over that for some time, we'll skip that and go right to one of the two Sony Ericsson Walkman phones to be launched here soon. The Sony Ericsson W550i Walkman phone is a tri-band GSM/GPRS handset. It's a non-Smartphone (i.e., it doesn't run SymbianOS or Windows Mobile or anything), but for the average user, it's got almost everything you can possibly ask for in a "frilly" phone. The phone is a Walkman-ised version of the S700i, the swivel phone which also incidently costs around the same at Rs. 15,000 (approximately). It isn't extremely bulky, though it feels that way in the picture. The phone uses a basic menu system, but applying the Walkman theme will slow it down and make it feel like a SymbianOS UI on a 66MHz processor (yes, I have something against the SymbianOS operating speed). Fortunately, only the first level menu is slow, the deeper level menus are as fast as the other Sony Ericssons.

• Walkman player:

To start with, its got a Walkman brand music player in it that's not just a basic phone music player, but a complete media player with a detailed interface like the iPods. You can browse for music by artist, track and other information just like you can on the iPod. However, we noticed that there was no way to sort the music by album names, something we found a bit strange. To kind of make up for that, you have an FM radio receiver that your iPod doesn't offer you. As usual, the stereo headset doubles up as the radio antenna. The phone can be turned on in the regular Phone or a Music-only mode, which is kinda comparable to the Flight mode that most PDAs offer in which you can use all the organizer features but not the network features. The W550i in Music mode lets you play back the music without having to worry about people calling or messaging you.

• Sound:

The sound quality is obviously very good, as is the case with most Sony Ericsson phones, but since this is a Walkman phone, it also incorporates Sony's trademark Mega Bass technology that does just that - gives you mega bass. Now this isn't necessarily a good thing - the sound was just distorting the tiny stereo earphones that are provided with the phone. The inline module with the button to answer calls on the handsfree is the stereo adapter for the W550i. Just plug out the provided earphones from there and you have a standard 3.5mm socket there. The phone does offer a 5-band equalizer that does a fair job of tweaking the sound. The phone also offers a stereo widening option for that "3D surround sound" effect we've all come to hate after seeing too much of it in all music devices. We would like to point out that the K750i, which is not a Walkman phone but has an MP3 player and all that stuff, is also capable of the same quality of sound without having a Walkman brand name.The one thing in this phone that makes the Walkman phone different from other phones and really earns the Walkman brand, is the fact that it has dedicated buttons on the side of the phone for music playback control. Apart from the volume up/down control which is a standard feature on any phone, the W550i offers a Play/Pause button and a Hold button that implements the phone's keypad lock/unlock feature in a more Walkman-ish way.

• Inbuilt Memory card & Camera:

Before you go all out with your cash and credit cards and what not to buy this phone (it isn't that expensive), you'll need to know that it has only 256MB of inbuilt memory with no way of adding any more to it. That's right, folks, there's no Memory Stick Duo or Pro slot out here. So you're stuck with only 256MB of memory, out of which a few will be given off to the system and other applications, a lot of them will be used up by the 1.3 megapixel digital camera, leaving you with just around 200-220MB for your music. If you store your music in basic quality MP3 format (128kbps), that translates to around 200-odd minutes of music or just about three audio CDs worth, which is still enough for the average user. The phone supports MP3s and AACs, but strangely no ATRAC3/ATRAC3plus compressed music (OMA/OMG), which is the second thing we found very strange for a Sony device that this phone is. But hey, if it makes you feel any better, you don't have to break your head over SonicStage to transfer music to the phone! :-) In fact, the phone, once connected to the PC via the provided USB cable, which is a bit tricky if you have the phone slid open, turns up as a regular USB Mass Storage device on Windows with its own drive letter, so you can simply drag and drop music into it without any additional software. But the catch is that you need to install the W550i driver for this feature to work, so its not true 100% USB Mass Storage compliant. But it's sure as hell better than your iPod that forces you to use iTunes or an alternative. And it charges via USB! Thank you! Apart from USB, the phone also offers Bluetooth and Infrared connectivity.

• Software:

For the not-so-savvy users, the phone also ships with the Disc2Phone software that lets you rip audio to MP3s and transfer them to the phone and Sony Ericsson PC Suite, but our CD was defective, in that the Disc2Phone application installer was corrupt. We could have downloaded a copy to try it out, but since the USB storage thing works out so simply, we didn't feel the need to. The W550i also came with a free Ricky Martin promo CD containing some music, videos and wallpapers which we didn't take out of the sleeve for the good of all humanity. The phone, when connected to the PC via USB, offers two connection options: Phone mode and File mode. File mode is what you need to pick if you want it to show up as a removable drive, and Phone mode is what is required by the Sony Ericsson PC Suite software for managing the phone. When in File mode, the phone cannot be used to do anything, which is again something we found a bit strange. After unplugging from the PC, the phone automatically shuts down and needs to be manually restarted.

• Camera:

The 1.3 megapixel digital camera takes good quality pictures that look fine on the 176x220 1.8" 262k color screen, as well as the PC when transferred. Just like the S700i, the phone needs to be turned sideways for ideal picture taking just like a regular camera. The entire screen becomes the viewfinder and offers a menu system similar to the camera. The phone has an LED flash which can be turned on even before the shutter button is touched, which is something new. The camera also records video with MMS or no size limit, but it doesn't record sound. Playback of video is also a bit limited, in that it can be rotated for portrait or landscape mode playback, but not occupying the entire screen.

• Battery:

The phone offers a battery life of upto 30 hours - we're talking about the Music only mode, obviously! - which may (will) vary from usage. As for the phone's network features, Sony claims 8 hour talk time and around 15 days of stand by. We didn't actually talk for that long, but yeah, it went a couple of hours in just fine. For around Rs. 15,000, this is a good buy if you're really into the whole Walkman thing (the logo is SO cool) - it offers good music and FM playback features, a great camera with video playback, drag and drop USB connectivity and other features in a very cool looking Walkman-branded phone.