Going from an old Nokia 6200 (which had great call quality and was ahead of its times) to a Moto Razr I suffered the torments of usability hell. No memory, no headphone jacks, terrible address book, substandard camera, terrible alarm clock, etc etc.
The day I got my digits on the W810i (i for international, unlocked quad band) was a happy day for me. Now, one year into using it I can expertly outline the pros and cons, and authoritatively issue bouquets and brickbats.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hot -
* Great battery life. I don't measure this in terms of hours and minutes but the reality of how often I had to charge. I use the phone quite a lot for listening to music especially and have never run out of charge when on the road. On days of low usage I have gone 3 days without a recharge, but topping up for 1 hour everyday is all you need. With the Razr I was constantly being stranded with a dead phone.
* Superior voice quality - as distinct from CALL quality, which thanks to Cingular sucks like a vaccuum cleaner!
* Walkman quality music - I use iPod earbuds for a good reason, sometimes a Sony MDR 7506- More later.
* An expandable Sony ProDuo memory slot of upto 2GB.
I bought the phone with 512 MB and have not needed to upgrade yet.
* A feature rich 2 MP camera with flash, white balance controls, macro mode, night mode, zoom, resolution settings, and effects settings. This is quite adequate for point and click oppotunities - but also great for video, I bring out my Rebel XT 8MP only for more "artistic" photography.
* A great FM radio. Works really well, although it does require the customary earphone-jack extension that also works as an antenna. I say "customary" because I don't think there is any phone that can play the radio without having to attach the headset cord.
* The proprietary audio jack (Sony Ericsson only) actually ends in a generic RCA type stero headphone plug! This saved the phone and allowed me to jettison their earbud in favour of the iBud, or my Hi-Fi studio monitor when I feel like it. You can easily switch from whatever you're listening to -- the radio, the MP3 player or the video player and take a phone call by clicking a button. The song is paused, and will continue where you left off after ending the phone call. The iPhone is trumpeting this feature, but its been a part of the W810i for over a year.
* Has an MIDP 2.0 mobile java O/S, which means you can download any and every java app. I use the Opera Mobile browser instead of the packaged Sony browser and google maps which are are also a free j2ME download - *no more paper printouts for me*. I also use a mobile app from cricinfo.tv for streaming cricket scores, and the pre-loaded Music Mate which playes basic guitar chords and also has a pitch pipe for tuning musical instruments.
I am a non-starter in video games so i won't comment, except to say i tried the "JC does Texas" preloaded game - it was fun, but did not convert me into a gamer ;-)
* The Address book is really excellent. It has a full featured contact list system like a vCard that includes full address and multiple phone numbers for the same contact. In theory the calendar and address books can be synched with Outlook if you download the Sony Ericsson PC Suite and connect use Outlook to synch calendar and contacts. I have no reason to believe this won't work, except my work place will not allow personal devices to be installed or synched up on the work machine. At home I don't use Outlook, so I'm missing out on all the calendar and reminder functionality
* A nice alarm clock that lets you select days of the week you find" alarming".
So my alarm does not go off on weekends, then comes back on every day of the week.
This is a big improvement over the old way where you had to manually set the alarm for each day.
You snooze, you lose.
* I found this out very recently - but the phone plays videos appreciably. There is a minor geek factor to this, but well worth it. You can take pretty much any video file you have - from P2P, DVDs, flash, etc and convert it to the 3gp format. I use a free universal encoder that's quite a wonder. Its called SUPER and you will find it at e-rightsoft - For example I watched the final episode of Heroes on my phone in a flight. Downloaded from bittorrent, encoded to 3gp to a 176*144 format that took all of 90MB. You can watch full length movies doing this, but the movie player functions like bookmarking are sorely missing for long files. If you don't watch the full movie at a stretch, you'll spend minutes simply forwarding to the correct spot the next time.
THIS IS HUGE -- you can take any YouTube video with you on this phone. Yeah, yeah its a two step process but which one of you is busy saving the world anyway. Get a firefox plugin for downloading YouTube videos as .flv files (flash videos), then use SUPER to encode into 3gp. Voila! -- I have Rihanna's Umbrella and Fergie's Bumps accompany me on all my rides.
* The phone is recognized a USB plug-and-play drive. Need I say more?
This is very useful, because its easy to move files and also charge it anywhere I have a computer with USB! Forget DRM, everyone is going away from that anyway. Also, Apple's way of requiring iTunes and having to register a device by deviceID before using it, that is way too restrictive.
My kingdom for USB P'nP freedom!
* W810 has Bluetooth and Infra Red ports. Use them for file transfers, synching or for headsets.
* An email client that is configurable for POP3 so I get my gmail, no problems. This is not a business phone so there is none, and never will be support for corporate email. Its easy enough getting to your personal email though, even without POP. Use the browser, doh!
* pretty standard but worth mentioning - has voice dialing, that can save you in some situations.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not -
* No WiFi !
* No GPS receiver. This means that when you use google maps you have to manually figure out where you are, then also check if you are sticking to the route. I have had no problems with this myself, but could be incovenient for some.
* The T9 texting system is disappointing. The Razr did it much better. There is no multi-select word completion, and there is not auto-add to dictionary any time you type out a word that was not in the dictionary. The process of adding your own short forms, cute names and whatnot is very manual and laborious. Also, the auto completion with the Razr showed multiple word possiblities in a multi-select as you typed (like the AJAX javascript lookups in gmail adress) so that meant you could really fly through the message.
* An open chat interface called MyFriends (under the Messages menu) using which you can log on to all your chat clients at once - AIM, yahoo, msn and IRC - possibly google chat but i've not cracked that nut yet.
The setup is strictly for nerds/geeks/professionals - an average user could never set this up. After spends hours on many forums I was able to set it up. You need the use of a free third party registration system: Yamigo to create a chat profile to which you can add your chat accounts. When you create your MyFriends profile in the W810, you need to provide the URL as the server and select the Allow Connection tab to "Any Network" or else this won't work.
MyFriends is a very ambitious concept and works in essence but fails in usability.
It keeps the internet connection open always because it relies on an HTTP service. When you lose connection it logs you out of all your chat systems, requiring you to re-login. PAINFUL. It also drains the battery a lot. Sony would have done better to do what the Razr did, have an AIM chat client onboard that connects directly to the AIM server, so you did not have to use a third party http service.
The best option is to set up the AIM and yahoo accounts to forward to cell phone when not signed in. Works like a charm.
* The phone is capable of playing streams really - but bleeds to death on Cingular's cutting "EDGE".
Hear me ye all - Cingular is the one thing that can kill Apple's iPhone. The situation can only be rescued if Jobs takes it over and refurbishes their network from the ground up.
I have NOT found a realplayer for java mobile yet, so it is really a player problem.
I'm sure there's an open source java project out there that can play all the streams.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shot -
* The earbuds from Sony are pure product suicide. They are so bad that I could barely hear the music and calls. If I had not tried the iBuds I may have hated this phone, only because of Sony's lazily and badly produced earbuds. That would have been a real shame because this is really quite an instrument.
* browsing pictures on the phone is painfully slow.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What you got - The W810i is already more and does more than the iPhone will ever be, or do. Hi-Fi music, first class camera, great voice quality (when the signal exists!), calendar, addressbook, reminders, notes, alarms, email, SMS, MMS, bluetooth, video recording and playback. The iPhone will conquer the world anyway, because it has sex appeal and ease of use like never before. Contextual buttons that come and go, basically an expanded interactive menu system. Brilliant breakthrough in usability. For those who don't want to spend the big bucks, you can get all that and more in less than half the price here.
