AT&T and Sony have meddled together and come up with a flip-phone for those that have a passion for music and won’t settle for a measly MP3 player. For those music enthusiasts they released the Sony Ericsson W518a Walkman phone. Some nice Music features include: FM radio, Bluetooth A2DP, Walkman Player 3.0, and XcrossMediaBar (say cross for the X) player. This slimster flip-phone comes with other standard features like a 3.2 megapixel camera, GPS, Video Share calling, and CV on-demand video. Currently the price at AT&T is $199, with contract. Hop over the jump for the review.
Compliments & Complaints
Compliments: It’s all about the music, the video performance wasn’t shabby, features, lovely display.
Complaints: Sluggish, flat keys making texting not very easy, below average call quality, more is expected from a 3.2 megapixel camera.
Style and Design
First of all, it’s a clam shell. If you’re not a flip-phone fan then this phone is obviously not for you. This is a glossy phone that looks good with a dark grey cover and a black back. Dimensions: 3.7” x 1.9” x 0.6” when closed. This Walkman is rather thin for a flip-phone. The display is small, 2.2”, and the only touch capabilities are reserved for things like music controls. It has standard color support. Since this phone is focused on it being a Walkman, the display isn’t much to fizzle about.
One thing to complain about is that the SIM card hides underneath the battery. To save them, Sony didn’t give the Memory Stick Micro (M2) the same resting place. It also hides under the battery cover but not the battery, making it unnecessary to remove the batter to remove the memory card.
The keypad isn’t for the mobile gamers since the number keys don’t compliment any fingers. The four-way keypad is the d-pad, surrounding a large center key with the Call Send on one side and Call End on the other. The right side has the volume rocker and the left side has the charging/syncing port.
Battery and Memory
A 900 mAh Li-Ion battery, model BST-39, powers the Sony Ericsson W518a. This will allows them to give a claimed 4 hours of babbling and 16 days of losing it under the seat without it dying on you. While watching television, listening to music after downloading the phone and using the heck out of the GPS will make liars out of Sony and not give you the said time. Regular use, however, will go a bit above.
Camera
Finally, cell phone manufacturers are getting the hint and putting a 3.2 mega pixel camera on their new phones, well, at least this one. Pictures that are taken from this higher quality will capture those moments that need evidence – or those special and happy moments too! Just be sure the lens cover is cleaned because it catches grease and smudges like a fly trap. Camera features include three color effects, four white balance modes, adjustable brightness, self-timer, digital zoom with the VGA resolution, shutter sounds, two quality settings, four picture sizes, and a night-mode. There is no self-portrait mirror so you’ll have to rely on your reflection off of the lens.
The video recorder captures moving life at QVGA 320 x 240 resolution and 15fps with audio. The lengths of the videos are as long as your memory card permits. Videos for messages are capped at 45 seconds, or so.
Media
This is clearly for music while flying with the wind. As said before the Ericsson W518a has the XrossMediaBar (XMB) and the Walkman Player 3.0. The accelerometer can be used as gesture control to skip tracks, forward, rewind, volume change, ‘snooze’ the alarms, but doesn’t use this gesture technology for great things like the iSamurai. That’s too bad. It would be advisable to turn the gesture control off when jumping some jacks. Music can’t be fully enjoyed without proper headphones or Bluetooth accessories; the speaker phone isn’t worth talking much about other than to say that it works and well enough to be heard. The day Bose designs potent speaker small enough for cell phones are the day stereo systems will be obsolete.
Features of the player include an equalizer, stereo widening, play lists, airplane mode, loop and shuffle modes, audio book and podcast play.
Syncing software at SonyEricsson.com/support is free; the cable, however, is not. If you are upgrading from another Sony Ericsson phone and have a cable from that, it should work as the same cable is used for most. Syncing music is fairly simple.
Video phone is mediocre but better than expected and can be enjoyed if your eyes are good enough to see the small display. For the price and the relatively low priced, $15 per month, unlimited data plan, it’s not a bad experience with video being a collateral feature. YouTube videos are played well when played from their mobile site and we can’t recommend you pay for any video on this phone. The beauty of 3G and free content makes living in this age a nice experience.
Messaging
The messaging support is video, picture, and sound messages, SMS, and IM with AIM, Windows Live, and Yahoo! Facebook updates can be displayed, when the option is turned on, while the phone is in standby. This way is much quicker than accessing Facebook via the web browser.
Calling
Being a quad band GSM world phone, calling on the Sony Ericsson W518a won’t be limited to the US of A. It works on 850/1900/2100 MHz bands with 3G HSDPA 3.6 Mbps but not on T-Mobile’s 3G – sorry T-Mobile loyalists. The calling was free from static and interference but the voice quality was only average, but no bad. You can’t plan on having a great conversation on the speaker phone.
Do you have 1000 contacts with 7000 phone numbers? That’s how many the Ericsson W518a holds. Voice tags will be required for the voice activation for calling and 9 speed dial numbers slots are available.
The Gist of It
If you like flip-phones, AT&T, music, messaging, Facebook, and just have a phone for convenience then this is your phone. It doesn’t have the best call quality but it makes up for that in the media section, except that it’s not a great video playing phone.
Specs:
Carrier: AT&T
Phone Type: Flip
Camera: 3.2 megapixels
Music and Tones:
HFi Ringers, MP3 tones, and MegaTones support; Music formats – mp3, AAC, AAC +, Enhanced AAC+. And WMA. FM radio.
QWERTY: Nope
Screen: 240 x 320 pixels; 2.2” QVGA 262K color TFT
Speaker Phone: Yes
Bluetooth: v2.0
Web: yes
Networks:
GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900; UMTS/HSDPA 850/1900/2100
Dimensions: 3.7 x 2.0 x 0.6 inches
Weight: 3.5 oz
Display: 262.144 color TFT, 240×320 pixel (internal)
Memory: Memory Stick Micro supporting up to 16GB M2 card; Internal memory: 100MB
UsageTime:
10 hours on GSM/GPRS/EDGE; 4 hours on UMTS/HSDPA; 2 hours of video call but only on UMTS/HSDPA. 24 hours of music play.
StandbyTime:
400 hours on GSM/GPRS/EDGE; 400 hours on UMTS/HSDPA
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Does anybody have any experience with the Philips MC235B Flat Wall Mountable Micro Shelf Program I was thinking about obtaining it and just wasn’t certain if its the best 1 to purchase.
This phone teethered a Macbook Pro and a TomTom 930 wonderfully out of the box but as soon as the firmware was upgraded, forget it. It also hung frequently, requiring the removal of the battery to reboot hence the firmware upgrade attempt to see if they fixed that, they hadn’t. Another issue is that you can’t set a prefix with pauses to make the use of a calling card convenient. That’s important when you unlock the phone to use local SIM cards in countries where the cell phone rates are still astronomical.