Sony Ericsson w580i Cell Phone

After owning a Sony W600 walkman cellular phone for almost two years, I went into my local AT&T store and "upgraded" my phone. I was actually just shopping for a new phone for my wife, but after talking with the store manager and making a call to AT&T directly, I was able to work out a two for one deal, so I upgraded both lines. In this review, I'll compare and contrast the two phones and (hopefully) add some additional insight on the phone since there are several reviews here for everyone to read. I'll divide this review into the following categories: price, size, durability, call quality, camera, internet/email, and design. Here we go!


Price-

First of all, do your shopping before buying this phone! The phone has a retail (unlocked) cost of between $230-$350 depending on where you buy it, but with a service contract, that price drops substantially. At the AT&T store and website, the phone was on sale for $49 after $50 mail-in rebate, but both Best Buy and Wal-mart had the phone for free with either a mail-in rebate or no rebates at all! Being an 8 year AT&T subscriber, I made a call, threatened to take my service elsewhere, and was given a credit to my account that resulted in the phones being free (although I still have to wait for my rebate debit cards to arrive in a few months). For what you get, $49 isn't a bad price. My W600 was $199 after rebates and discounts, so the $49 price is definitely better.

Final verdict: If you can shop around and get the W580 for free, that's a great deal. Grade- B+


Size-

My W600 was a fatty at about an inch thick, a little over two inches wide, and maybe three inches long when unopened (probably just over 5 inches when opened). The W580 is quite a bit smaller, mainly by being a lot thinner. It's a little over a half inch thick (the bottom of the phone curves, adding a few millimeters at the bottom), two inches or so across, and not quite four inches tall when closed (five when opened). That form factor makes it easy to slide into a pocket or bag. Of course, since the screen is on the front and completely unprotected, you probably don't want to throw your phone into a bag or pocket that has other metal or hard objects. The result will probably be a scratched/ cracked screen at some point! I keep mine in a case by DlO, but I have to admit that the case doesn't have the best design (it blocks your pants pocket when the case is on your belt), so I'll be swapping that case with the standard AT&T case that goes sideways instead of up and down. Compared to a flip-phone, this phone is much larger, but it is about the same size or smaller than most of the popular smartphones (the Palms and Blackberries).

Final verdict: The size is better than the previous version of the walkman phone and on par with the more feature-filled phones out there. Grade- B


Durability-

This phone is almost all plastic, but that's how almost all cell phones are constructed these days. The only non-plastic parts are the buttons, which look to be aluminum. Do I think this phone will last a decade? No, I don't. It should stand up for a couple of years though if you baby it a little. Like I mentioned above, the first thing you'll want to do is get a case. That should really extend the life of the phone. You can also track down a screen protector (just buy an iPod screen protector and cut it to fit your phone screen) and apply that to prevent scratches on the screen. There are only two ports on the phone (which is actually one more than the W600 has), with one being covered and the other not. The media card slot has a cover and the port for charging or connecting a headset is uncovered. That means that dirt and grime could build up in that port given enough time and the right environment. My old W600 had a cover for the charging/ headset port, which was a nice feature, but it wasn't actually attached to the body of the phone. As a result, I lost it within about four months and ended up having the cover exposed the rest of the time I owned the phone.

Final verdict: It probably isn't the most durable phone out there, but taking proper precautions should extend the life of the phone nicely. Grade- C


Call quality-

Here's where the rubber really hits the road! If you're going to buy a phone, you should at least be able to use it effectively as a phone, right? The call quality for this phone is similar to that of the W600, which had above average call quality in my main calling area (Central Illinois). The sound quality is a little tinny at times and can be especially quiet if using the speakerphone option, so the W600 is a little better in those regards. The people on the other end of the line had to trouble hearing me, so that's a good thing too.

As far as signal reception, that has been fine also (I generally have 4-5 bars at all times), but there are certain places (like elevators) where the W600 still said it had a signal while the W580 has no bars. Basically, the phone does do an average to above average job placing calls and allowing you to hear callers, but it perform slightly worse than the W600.

Final verdict: Solid but not exceptional call quality. Grade: C+

Camera-

It's hard to find a cell phone these days that doesn't have a camera on it. Sometimes those cameras are pretty poor, and sometimes they are great (at least for a cell phone). The W580 splits the difference. It has a 2.0 megapixel camera, does video recording, and even has some editing tools both on the camera and as part of the software package that you can install on your computer to sync the camera with your address book/calendar and move files around. What it lacks primarily is a flash. The W600 also did not have a "flash", but it did have a light that you could turn on that would act as a flash. It ate up electricity, but it let you take those low-light shots. The W580 does have some image compensation functions to help you take low-light images (which the W600 also had on top of the light), but don't expect to take very good photos when the light conditions are poor.

The built-in memory of the camera can hold around 20 pictures at the highest image resolution (depending on how much other data you have stored on your phone). If you use the higher camera resolution (2.0 MP), you lose the digital zoom function. So if you select an image size of less than 2.0 MP, you can use the digital zoom function for up to 4X digital zoom. The W600 is similar in those regards, but with a larger amount of built-in memory, you can take a lot more pictures. Keep in mind though that the W580 has expandable memory, so you can hold a lot more images and video if you have a memory stick installed. The W600 does not have expandable memory, so once you fill the memory, you have to get all of your images/ video dumped off before you can take any more.

The camera itself is hidden when the phone is closed, so to take a picture you have to open the phone. Once open, you hold the phone almost like you are going to talk on it and then take your pictures. The W600 is better laid out in that manner; the phone can remain closed and you hold it more like you would hold a regular point-and-shoot camera when taking images/ video. It would have been nice then if the W580 could have maintained some of that layout as opposed to going with the more traditional cell phone-style layout. It's just something about holding your phone like you would a camera that makes the photography feel a lot more like standard photography as opposed to that feeling that you're about to waste your time taking a bad image on a cell phone;-)

Final verdict: The camera works as well as any other 2.0 MP camera, but this isn't something you would want to take your cherished family photos with. Lack of a flash reduces its utility, and going with the up-and-down layout for imaging detracts also. Grade: C


Internet/ Email-

My W600 could grab email and connect me to the internet, but with its smallish screen I rarely used those functions. In fact, at one point I ended up taking the service off completely because it was a waste of my $15 per month. I decided to add everything back though when we got the W580s. It took me about 2 minutes to set it up to read my hotmail account and another 2 minutes to set up my AIM account for instant messaging. I was pretty impressed with that considering it took me several hours to do the same thing on my W600. It looks like between the time I got the W600 and now, the phones have gotten much better software that allows easy connection to those services (I saw 4 or 5 common email providers and a similar number of instant messaging services available to pick from). Of course, I'd bet that if you wanted to connect to a smaller internet service provider for your email, it might take you more like an hour to get it properly set up and running.

The connection to the internet/ email is ok, but not speedy. This phone is not a 3G phone, so no high-speed internet. Of course, our area doesn't even have 3G in the area, so I couldn't provide any comparison of using 2G versus 3G even if I had a 3G capable phone;-) It took the phone about 10 seconds or so to pull up my inbox and a few seconds to pull up individual emails. Grabbing websites using MediaNet took about 10 seconds. If you go beyond the MediaNet sites and start exploring the rest of the web, the sites are slightly slower to load but not horribly slow. Essentially, accessing email and websites is at a speed similar to what you would have if you were using a fast dial-up connection (if anyone reading this remembers what those are). One last thing; keep in mind that these downloads do eat into your data usage, so downloading larger pages can really eat into your available data (and maybe lead to a big bill down the road). OperaMini does a good job of keeping those page sizes down by eliminating images and other extra bits, so that's something you would want to explore if you think you'll be doing lots of web browsing. Oh, and make sure you don't go and download an email attachment that is 7MB without realizing it, since you could really chew up your data allotment that way.

Final verdict: Email and instant messaging were easy to set up. Internet works well enough, although not super-fast. Grade- B


Design-

There are a lot of neat features and other things I wanted to try and mention, but I didn't want to have 12 subsections for this review, so I'll spend a little time talking about different design features that I felt were noteworthy.

First, I'll mention the accessory port. It is nice to only have one port to deal with, but doing that has some major drawbacks. First, you cannot have a wired headset attached while charging the phone because they both need to be connected to the same port. Secondly, you have to have the special "adapter cable" to connect a headset to your phone. So although you can connect any wired headset you want to the phone, you always have to have the Sony proprietary cable connected to the phone and then the headset connected to that cable. That means that you have to carry an extra cable around at all times. The W600 suffers from this same problem.

The phone does have a built-in FM radio, which is nice considering my iPod does not. Keep in mind though that to use the radio you have to have the headset adapter cable attached, since it serves as the antenna for the radio. That means that if you lose that cable, you also lose the ability to listen to FM radio. Again, this was also a problem with the W600.

The phone has a memory stick, giving you unlimited storage (or at least limited by how much you're willing to spend on cards). That's a real advance over the W600, with it's built-in memory capacity of about 600MB. The only problem here is that it doesn't use the standard microSD card, but instead uses Sony's version of the card. A 1GB microSD card runs about $5 online and 2GB cards can be found for $10 (if you go to BestBuy or Circuit City, those cards will be $20-$40, so shop online if you can to save a LOT of money there), while the Sony version of the card costs about 25% more. I bought a 2GB card for $15.00 at Newegg.com (which would have been $39 at Bestbuy and AT&T). The phone can handle up to a 4GB card, which is a good amount of storage for most users.

Speaking of storage, what are you going to use all of that storage for? Music, video, and images, of course. I discussed taking images and video, but I should also mention that you do have to take a look at how to export those videos back to your computer. The phone records in 3gp and that can be converted into something useful if you want to use the video in actual video projects. The phone is also supposed to be able to play MP4 videos. As far as music goes, if you want to put music on the phone, it has to be done through Sony's PC Suite software so that the MP3s can be properly moved over to the phone. It seems like an unnecessary step, but it seems to be a pretty common "feature" of Sony phones.

Now that I have mentioned the PC Suite software, let me mention that this is a very useful tool. You can backup your address book and calendar to your PC and sync your PC with your phone. Not only does it mean that your email addresses and phone numbers are always staying up to date, but it also means that changing phones is easier because you don't have to rely on being able to move the settings from your old phone to the new one; you just have to be able to sync the new phone with your PC like you did with your old phone. I can't tell you how many times I've had to have people call me to put their phone numbers back after buying a new phone! There is also a piece of software that let's you use the shake feature of the phone as a pedometer and track the amount of steps you are taking and the associated calories burned. It seems like an odd piece of software to include, but I won't complain if someone has a real use for it.

One benefit of the slider layout is that you can set it to automatically lock/ unlock or to answer/ end a call by opening or closing the phone. That means you aren't shuffling through menus or looking for buttons to lock the phone down. The W600 did have the option to answer when opened I believe (I never used it personally), but the lock button was on the side and could accidentally get hit. So I like this lock/ unlock method better and it fits with the style of the W580.

The menu system for the W580 is very similar to the W600 and not too different than other Sony cell phones. It relies of the navigation button and softkeys primarily along with icons and tabbed menu screens to access all of the settings. If you are familiar with their phones, it isn't a big change, but if you've never owned one of their phones, you'll need some time to familiarize yourself with the menus. Some of the one-touch buttons seem handy, but can also get in the way. For example, there are dedicated buttons for the Walkman function and the MediaNet screen, and accidentally hitting one of those buttons can result in music playing at inopportune times (maybe during a meeting) or you accidentally connecting to the internet. Another reason to make sure you always lock the phone when it isn't in use. I had this same problem with my W600 though, so it just means that they still haven't figured out how to address that possibility with the current button layout.

Bluetooth is a nice feature and present on just about every good cell phone available now. This phone does have stereo bluetooth though (too bad I don't have a bluetooth stereo headset), and that isn't an option on all of the phones. Getting the bluetooth connection set up between the phone and my PC was easy for the first phone, but more difficult for the second (the PC got confused having two phones of the same type getting installed). It ended up taking me 10 minutes to get the first phone connected and another 45 minutes to get the second one figured out. Once you have bluetooth going, you can sync your phone, but you can't transfer files. To do that, you have to use a cable that turns that charger/ headset port into a USB connection. Doing that allows you to both move files back and forth and also treat the memory card in the phone like a portable drive. Of course, if you lose that cable, you'll have real problems moving files between the PC and phone (by the way, I saw no references to compatibility with MACs, so I assume everything must be done on a PC). So the final count of things connecting to that one side port: 2 cables (headset adapter and USB adapter) and the charger.

The walkman function is ok. I like to think of it as a good backup MP3 player, but not one that I would use as my primary player. The reason for that isn't so much in the functionality of the phone (it actually plays music well with the included headset), but in the software. If it was more like owning an iPod, where your music syncs automatically and you can generate playlists easily, then this would be a nice combination phone/ MP3 player. Without that software package though, it just becomes a place where you can keep some tunes for an emergency. Of course, if you don't have an MP3 player and haven't accidentally been given one by making a purchase at Old Navy, Sears, a large number of online electronics companies, or by sending in a handful of UPC codes and a check to cover shipping, then this is a cheap way to get into that whole digital music "phase" the kids are talking about;-)

The battery life so far has been fine. My W600 was at the point where it needed to be charged every other day, and this phone has gone almost 2 days with no charging and is still at 70% battery remaining. Accessing the battery (and SIM card) is easy; you slide off the cover on the back of the phone. It's actually more like you pop it open a little and then slide it the rest of the way off. Other phones have backs that slide off a little easier, but this is far better than some of the more difficult phones I have run into in regards to accessing the battery compartment.

Lastly, I want to mention that the phone comes in a few different colors. Unlike the W600, you can't take off the face plates (the W600 could be orange or dark blue). With the W580, you're locked into whatever color it came in. I have seen five colors so far (gray, white, green, red, and pink). The gray and white phones are the only ones that are one color. The others have a strip of white that runs along the outer edge.

Final verdict: Lots of handy features, with only a couple that differ from the W600. If anything, some of the features are actually downgraded or exactly the same as the W600. The properitary software, memory card, and cables detract from the general usability of the phone, but the feature set is pretty robust for a cell phone. It isn't quite a smartphone, but it's probably the closest thing to it without being a true smartphone. Grade: B


Overall verdict-
This is really a feature-laden phone that sits right between a classic cellular phone and a smart phone. The larger screen makes video and images easily viewable, the form factor is smaller than other versions of the walkman phone, but not overly small, and the reception the phone gets is good. If Sony would have moved away from all of their proprietary ports, cables, and software and tried to put out a phone that didn't rely so much on these non-standard items, it would be a real winner! Grade: B+