13 Mar 2008
The Sony Ericsson W380i is a clamshell Walkman phone with some unusual twists. It is available in three colours: Electric Purple, Magnetic Grey and Black Champagne. The shape of the W380i is similar to that of the Motorola V3 or LG u890 with straight edges measuring 92 x 49 x 16mm and the handset weighs just 100g.

What makes the Sony Ericsson W380i unconventional (beyond it's colour options) are the features that are available when the clam is closed. First are the basic music controls and accompanying speaker on the front of the phone. The radio station or song you're listening to is also displayed on the outside of the handset. The feature that sets the W380i apart is gesture control, which allows you to mute an incoming call or activate snooze on the alarm clock simply by moving your hand over the phone; this was somewhat tricky to get used to but extremely useful for when the phone was left on the desk whilst at work. On the back of the handset is another surprisingly unusual feature, an iPod style lock button that deactivates all the buttons on the outside of the Sony W380i to prevent music from being played inside the pocket of your trousers.

The keypad for the Sony Ericsson W380i is perfect with no touch sensitive keys and a near perfect layout. The navigation pad is easy to use with a smart blue select button in the centre. The W380i has three more keys than most other phones just above the numbers, their functionality depends primarily on the network, but these are unlikely to be pressed by accident because they are shorter than the other buttons. The 1.9 inch screen is smaller than we would have hoped considering the size of the casing, but the quality of the TFT screen is at least superb.

The camera in the Sony Ericsson W380i is quite standard for a budget to moderate handset, which means that compared to many new phones on the market, the quality of pictures taken will be disappointing. The W380i has a 1.3 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom. It lacks autofocus or flash so is fine for relatively close daytime shots but will produce mediocre images in any other situation. That said, the performance was fast and the camera was easily accessible from the handset's menus.

As with all Sony Walkman phones, the music features on the W380i handset are impressive. Music is sorted by artist, album or track as on an iPod and the W380i allows you to create playlists of your favourite tracks. It has MegaBass enhanced bass sound and Sony's PlayNow for downloading new tracks directly to the phone. Of course, you can use the rather easy software for transferring music (along with photos and video clips) to and from a computer. Although it's not a perfect service yet, the W380i does support the use of TrackID from Gracenote that allows you to record a few seconds of a song and search a database to automatically find out the name and artist of the track. There is also a great FM radio that displays the name of the station and also the name of the track playing with a number of compatible radio stations.

The Sony Ericsson W380i is a pretty basic handset when it comes to web browsing although it does have EDGE for faster data transfer. However, it's other basic features are good as on all Sony Ericsson handsets. The small 14MB of internal memory can be expanded using Memory Stick Micro cards of up to 2GB. The phone is quad band and the battery supports a standard 7 hours of talk time or a more impressive 300 hours of standby.

Overall, this is a great Walkman phone for the Walkman features with the extra impressive gadget of Gesture Control. If those are the features you want, then this is a smart buy, but the Sony W380i won't satisfy everyone.

Find out more about the Sony Ericsson W380i at sonyericsson.com
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