Sony Ericsson W350 Review

Multimedia:

The music player is Walkman 2.0, instead of the newer third one, but we expected that for a budget model. You can see all tracks, sort them by artist, album, genre or look at the saved playlists. When you play a song, a small album cover appears in the upper part of the screen, accompanied by the activated additional settings (equalizer, repeat, shuffle), and in the lower part we see the track info.

Sony Ericsson W350 is equipped with a built-in FM radio with RDS, which uses the handsfree as an antenna. Its interface is very easy to use and offers the standard options for manual, semi-automatic and automatic search of stations and saving them.

When listening to music, the loudspeaker performed well, even when the phone was lying on its back, for example. The music heard in the earpieces is loud, but the quality is average. Due to the lack of insulation, the external noises can be still heard. Overall, we are not impressed, considering that even the older W200 did a better job.

The video player is extremely simple. You only have Play/Stop and once the video is playing, there is no option to pause it. Because of that, you’ll either have to watch it till the end or stop it and then play it again.

If you are looking for satisfying performance, we recommend converting the specific files in 3GP format with a H.263 codec in 176 x 220 and no more than 20 fps.


Camera:

The camera is 1.3-megapixel, no flash and it is only intended to snap pictures. As we expected, it doesn’t offer any incredible options, but you can still select the size and the quality of the images. There’s also a self-timer, various effects can be selected and you can set the white balance. The pictures are low quality, but we didn’t expect anything else from a music-oriented, entry-level phone.


Software:

The Entertainment menu houses a few applications: the music editor MusicDJ, Video player, Games and TrackID. The last one is very useful and provides information on the track currently playing, by connecting to the Internet. Once you activate the feature, it’ll automatically connect to the web and will give you the information needed in about 20 seconds (saving, sending and analysis). Seeing a “no success” message will rarely happen.

There are a total of three games. The first one is Extreme Air SnowBoarding and as the name indicates, you are snowboarding and doing various tricks. There are a few game modes and you can kill quite some time with it. The second one is QuadraPop and is something like Tetris but with music notes. In Guitar Rock Tour (very similar to Guitar Hero), which is the last game in W350, you have to press different colors on the guitar strings, by using the keypad.