A Forgotten Acqusition, but Loved Nonetheless... - Rant with Mini Review on the Sony Ericsson W300i
Lately I have been on a Sony Ericsson kick as far as phones go... I don't know why, but they have won me over with their recent slew of phones for reliability factor and features. I mean, your "function and fashion" contenders like Motorola and Nokia should take note... You don't have to build a super complex phone and mark up the price or sacrifice functionality and design just to drive price down. They have proven that very well as of lately. Nokia used to make pretty devices for cheap and great functionality, even to this day, I am fondly reminded of my first mobile phone that I bought myself... a Nokia 3120 tri-band GSM phone.
But nowadays... there's a terrible schism between the cheap end and high end for Nokia. Get loaded up on features and you'll pay a fortune for the phone (N95 or N-Series in general) and the same if you go for the prettiest phone (the 8800 Sirocco edition). Go too low end and Nokia begins gutting things out like MP3 ringtones or even quality materials for a good fit and finish.
Motorola ever since they moved past the "triplets series" (V600 being one of the hallmarks) and into the RAZR's market (fashion). I will give Motorola some credit to bring fashion to the masses, as the RAZR is almost a cult icon of pop culture. Don't believe me? See Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children and Cloud's RAZR-esque phone as one example or the number of companies who have emulated it. Just Motorola's terms in development of user friendly phone software is a tad... dated? At first it was a P2K system which had its issues... I still remember my RAZR crashing back in the day. Heck, my girlfriend's ROKR has severe stability issue such as crashing in midst of a phone call with her friend! They would delve into the smart phone business with a Linux based system to try trumping the Symbian S40/S60, Symbian UIQ, and Windows Mobile crowd, but there was one problem... They made claims that developers could jump in, but they didn't really release a software development kit (SDK for short). The new consumer phones now use a hybrid Java/Unix environment which isn't much of a step forward, at least in my opinion.
Ericsson and Sony made a joint venture in 2001 merging the Ericsson mobile phone manufacturer with the Japanese consumer electronics company for those curious, as referred to their Wikipedia entry.
Sony Ericsson has been one to make pretty reliable phones, the early ones just couldn't keep up with the "big guns" of the fashionable consumer cell phone industry. While Motorola just pushed faster and faster with more features in smaller shells, people just got bored of the Sony Ericsson phones being too "boring". But it wasn't until Sony Ericsson had a unique idea... why not marry together a Sony product line into a phone? At the time this idea came to fruition... no one really liked it as "integration" devices seemed to be such a niche market. The Motorola ROKR E1 failed because they tried to muck up the P2K system with a bloated Java iTunes app and even some of the ROKR's were selectively quadband and most were triband in similar vein to the previous ancestor... the Motorola E398. With this fact in mind... They carefully fused the great parts of the Walkman line and merged with the reliability of the Sony Ericsson line for one hell of a fusion product. The media player side was simple and to the point. No clunky Java app, something natively based within the phone's operating system. Combine that with a shell that was emblazoned with the Walkman colors of white, black, and orange containing a stable operating system and there you had it. The birth of the Walkman phone by Sony Ericsson. On looking back with Wikipedia's entry... that was back in 2005! Then there was last year (2006) when Sony Ericsson did the same fusion for the Cybershot line introducing high end consumer camera parts into a cell phone
They have a wide line of phones now and the one on feature being the W300i. Unfortunately, mine is locked to AT&T, so I can't get too in-depth about the software side of things, from AT&T butchering the firmware to death. The phone's shape is very friendly and has a great tactile feel to it. It has a "throw it against the wall and not give a damn" sort of build that reminds me much of my first Nokia. I am not about to mar up the phone and test it, because I rather like it. It has a monochrome black and orange screen on the exterior being the only "downside" to the modern phones out there, but it works rather nicely to display simple information. Not like you need to display their entire data or life... The camera on it is a simple VGA one, so don't expect intense 3.2 megapixel quality that you'd find from a Cybershot (K-series) phone or some of the newer Walkman phones. There is a dedicated "Walkman" button to launch the media player which is just plain simple. Much like my P990i, this phone can also tune into the radio provided you have the wired headset plugged in. It can do RDS so you can see song titles as long as the station uses RDS to send out the information.
The phone has some "unique" features that really stand out for the type of device it is. There is an infrared port to beam things over, that's more of a "business" device item for shooting over digital business cards. There is also the matter on the memory card support. Sony makes claim that the largest supported size is a 512mb Memory Stick Micro (or M2 for short), but buyers from private shops and some forums say that the W300i can read all 4GB from a 4GB card. That is awesome on its own right, because the phone is as small as an iPod nano but albeit a little thicker. The "spine" of the hinge is like a loop, so it allows the hanging of a neckstrap for those who work at the gym or run, it makes carrying the phone a little easier!
Expect me to elaborate more on this phone after I degunk it of AT&T's grubby software and make it as good as the unbranded international edition.
