Sony Ericsson W880 Review

Interface:

As far as software is concerned W880 is a typical Sony Ericsson. The new series of the manufacturer does not come with a new user interface, which makes it very similar to the previous models. The musical software Walkman 2.0 is the available upgrade for this type of phones, but there is nothing so special about it really.

The unit’s home-screen displays system information only: level of signal strength/ battery, date, hour, etc. Unlike the Nokia Series 40, Sony Ericsson does not yet dispose of the option to display active information on the screen in stand-by mode, and thus use most of its potential. The four directions of the d-pad are shortcuts to various functions, three of them pre-defined whereas the fourth (right) is left to the user’s choice. In addition you can use the right-side shortcut button as well as the link to the Web browser. There is no Walkman key here like the one in the previous models. Anyway, you will not need such there so long as you have it on the left side.

The appearance of the Start menu can differ depending on the current visual theme you are using. By default the telephone shows the ‘Walkman’ theme with a 3 x 4 grid of animated icons, which is simply reminiscent of the ‘Old School’. Our unit had 2 themes on the card and one – in the built-in memory. Since Flash UI Themes is supported (as with W810), the menu can be replaced trouble-free. Apart from the colors, two of the themes altered the icons of the main menu as well. Perhaps the most interesting of them (though not most convenient) is the one called Citybeat, which turns the main menu into a horizontal list that can only be scrolled left/right. This system provides a lot of choice to personalize and themes are not restricted to color and icon change. They are capable of altering the menu type itself and adding effects like vibration at moving, etc. Unfortunately the sub-menus are hardly changed by the themes; they always appear as a horizontal list with several different tabs.



Phonebook:

In the contact list up to 1000 names can be loaded into the phone memory with several numbers each, but the total must not exceed 2500 numbers. Contacts are viewed in a vertical name list without images. There is an option to search by up to several symbols, but only applied to the first name word. This has been our major complaint for quite some time – there is no way to search by family name.
Each contact has a quite a lot of blank lines that are sufficient to fit the necessary information in most cases. Up to five numbers can be entered, but only one of a type (i.e. it is not possible to type two mobile phone numbers); also several e-mails and an address. There is a space for adding text information and one for birth date, which enables you to enter an All Day Event to your calendar. It is a bit inconvenient that it will not inform you of the exact age of the respective person. Each contact can be supplied with its own Caller ID image and Ring ID tone, which can also be a Video file.



Organizer:

Here you will find the standard Sony Ericsson organizer as well. The number of alarms has been increased to five; however, other problematic issues have not been fixed. For example, the days with ascribed events from the calendar are only barely marked in bold and one can hardly tell them from the rest. In the Task menu reminders with an alarm for certain hour can be set and the calculator interface is rather inconvenient. Notes, Timer and Stopwatch are also available. Code Memo is an odd application: in it you can create messages that are not protected by a password – it only serves for decoding them instead. However, anyone – even not knowing the password – can erase them, which makes us think there is little sense in this.





The voice control system is really useless and mediocre. It has to be manually activated and, not being speaker-independent, a voice tag for each name to be dialed must be recorded. While recording (respectively – searching) a voice tag, the unit must be in contact with your ear. First it displays the necessary instructions on the screen and in no time has to be pressed against the ear, so that you can hear the ‘beep’ sound prior to recording the tag. Whether one has performed that right is not registered by sound, which takes another look at the display in order to confirm you have successfully done so.








The telephone features around 16 – 17 Mb in-built user-available memory, which can be increased up to thru a Micro M2 card. We consider this to be a very impractical solution, typical for Sony Ericsson, because this card’s price is higher than that of its analogues and its capacity definitely does not exceed theirs. Fortunately the manufacturer has included a 1 Gb Micro M2 in the sales package. If you wish to replace it with a one of larger memory, there are M2 cards of up to 2 Gb on the market at present.