Sony Ericsson W810i

The best phone of 2005 still shines in 2006. The Sony Ericsson W810i Walkman phone is a minor update to the all-around excellent W800i Walkman, and unlike its predecessor, it will be offered directly by a U.S. carrier. The W810i does everything very well, if not perfectly: calling, gaming, photos, and music. But without an easy connection to PC music jukeboxes, it's still not quite a "Walkman."

The W810i is a handsome, easily pocketable candy-bar phone in black with orange highlights. The small, charcoal-gray keys are nearly perfect, with excellent tactile snap and good separation. The 176-by-220 color screen is bright, though the resolution is not superhigh. Dedicated music buttons make it easy to play, pause, fast-forward, or rewind tracks.

Like the W800i, the W810i has excellent reception and call quality. Sony Ericsson has bumped the formerly tri-band phone up to quad-band, for the best possible reception. The W810i aced our weak-signal test, and calls were crystal clear on both ends through the earpiece, speakerphone, and a Plantronics Voyager Bluetooth headset. The volume gets loud, but not thunderingly so. I had two complaints: Background noise comes through on calls very clearly, and the voice dialing is the primitive recorded-tag type. Battery life was good, with over 8 hours of talk time, though not quite up to the W800i's 11-plus hours.

The phone works as a Bluetooth modem, connects to headsets, transfers files over Bluetooth, and even works as a remote control for your PC. We got it working on a Mac as a modem, but not with iSync. The included PC software syncs contacts, calendars, notes, and tasks with Microsoft Outlook, and the roomy address book holds 1,000 contacts. The phone also has USB mass storage mode, so it's easy to drag and drop photos and songs on and off the phone. The phone comes with a USB cable and you can use it as a PC modem. In my tests, however, transfer speeds using Cingular's EDGE network were relatively slow, ranging from 93 to 111 Kbps.

Turn the W810i sideways to use it as a 2-megapixel camera. The lens on the back doesn't have a cover (unlike the W800i's), but it's recessed to prevent scratching. The autofocus took about 0.7 seconds to lock on, and it produced extremely sharp pictures. A burst mode for the impatient can capture four shots 0.3 seconds apart. We measured resolution at about 700 lines, which is very good. Outdoor shots were overexposed, with a bit of a haze over the image, and indoor shots didn't have the punchy colors of the Samsung MM-A800's 2MP camera. But those problems were quickly fixed in a photo-editing program, and this is still a very good phone camera. The camcorder function was useless, taking 176-by-144 videos at 10 frames per second, like many other cell-phone cameras.

Our W810i came loaded with games and applications, including a photo-editing app, a Tetris-like game, and an RSS reader. Cingular will probably clear those apps out when it starts selling the phone. The games you end up buying will play smoothly, as the phone got very good results on JBenchmark Java benchmark tests.— Continue Reading