Sony Ericsson W200i - The Thump is On.

If you are looking for a basic phone with a brilliant music player, then this is the pick for you. Here is the full review to let you know about this low budget walkman phone.

Pros:

• Excellent music player.
• Looks good and solid.
• Expandable memory with Memory stick Micro - M2
• Average VGA camera.

Cons:

• Clumsy screen.
• No Bluetooth.

Design:

The phone is simply solid, has a sturdy design and looks like the simplified version of w800i. The phone is made of tough enough plastic. The Phone weighs 85gms and sizes 101x44x18 mm. That’s only a bit less than w800i which is 100x46x20.5 mm. It comes in 2 colors - Rhythm Black, Pulse White. The Pulse white is front on the front and rear and given an orange strip on the side which looks almost similar to w800i and the Black unlike the white one had no orange strips on the sides instead it is full black. The Walkman™ logo is clearly visible on the black plastic.

The walkman button on the left is highlighted in orange on the black version and white with an orange logo on the white version. You can use the button to launch the walkman but to play the music you need to use the joystick. So the shortcut key just helps to launch the walkman application. A little below the button is a hot swap memory card slot for M2. The card slot is perfectly organized as there seem to be no problem using it. The phone package comes with 128mb memory and you know that is simply not sufficient to hold anything more than 2 of your favorite full albums. The phone supports upto a max of 1GB of memory if you want to have it. The right side of the phone is fixed with the usual volume control as in like other walkman phones. The power button is located on the top side.

The rear battery cover has a perforated grill made for the loud speaker. You can find the VGA camera lens that’s fixed somewhat lower to the actual surface. No cover is provided on the lens. Anyways its not required badly. The phone holds a Li-Ion 750 mAh battery under its back hood. The manufacturer claims that the battery can power the phone for upto 7 hours at talktime and 360hrs at stand by mode. For an average user, the battery life should last for about 2 days.

On the front the upper half of the phone has the color display which is capable of displaying up to 64,000 colors (UBC). The display has a resolution of 128x160. The dull screen is one disadvantage in the handset as it looked so dull and muddy. It has a high contrast though and bright. The lower half part has the keypad fixed. The plastic buttons are arranged in four lines as in any other phone. The keypad looks similar to w800i.

Above the number keys is a joy stick and the function keys on either sides. The joystick is hard and placed deeper enough to make your thumb ache after 10-15mins of continuous use like in playing games. Everything else is fine. The tapping speed should be decent using the keypad while composing messages.

Connectivity:

W200i is a Triband GSM phone supporting 3 Bands (GSM 900 / GSM 1800 / GSM 1900). You can surf the net using the Class 10 GPRS connection which can deliver speeds of 32 - 48 kbps. Unfortunately there is no Bluetooth. Thanks to the ancient IRDA for transferring data like ringtones and photos wirelessly from your friend’s phones. You can connect the phone using the supplied USB data cable. Like any other Sony Ericsson mobiles, w200i also has two modes for transfer between the handset and PC. The phone mode requires the bundled software to be installed in the pc. Other one is the Transfer File mode, which lets you use the phone as mass storage device and doesn’t require any software or drivers to be installed.

Features:

When it comes to features, it has nothing unusual except the high class Walkman™ music player that Sony Ericsson has been using in its Walkman™ series phones. The phone is based on simple Java™ platform like any other Sony Ericsson Phone. Users familiar with w800i interface should find using w200i similar.

As mentioned earlier, w200i boasts the fantastic Walkman™ series player that’s capable of playing basically MP3, AAC and video formats – 3gp and Mpeg4 coded video files (named MP4). Like the other walkman phones, w200i also has 5 preset equalizers including the exclusive Sony MegaBass™ preset that makes you lost in the tune. The radio is also a cool feature if you want to listen to different kinds of songs that don’t require any usage of your phone memory. The phone can store up to 20 FM stations in its memory and the FM radio has a support for RDS too. The included earphones are great and are plastic made. It couldn’t have been better for the w200i’s price tag. When sound matters for you, w200i is the best in its class for this value price tag.

The other basic features include a decent file browser, net-front web browser, alarm and a cool organizer that’s pretty useful to save all your appointments and note down the works to be done. Limitations like sites greater than 500kb can’t be surfed, apply to the wap browser. Calculator, countdown timer, stopwatch and code memo have been used in most of the SonyEricsson phones for quiet some time. So no changes are found in these things.

Apart from these, the handset is loaded with 2 java applications. Facewarp and Music Mate out of which the first one is a small photo editing tool with which you can take some portraits and make some changes to it like twisting and rotating and Music mate lets you learn about the musical instruments like piano, guitar and metronome. There are also good tools like musicDJ and photoDJ to show off your creative skills. This handset also has 2 games – QuadraPop and Treasure Towers.

You will have enough room for the contacts as this handset can store as many as 1000 contacts in the phone memory. You can store upto 5 different phone numbers in each contact entry (mobile, work, home, fax, other). Apart from the phone numbers you can also save e-mail, website URL, home and work address, birthday date and also additional information of the contact. You can use the any image to show up while there is an active call to the particular contact or even you can set a personal ringtone for a specific contact.

The phone saves 30 received, dialed and missed calls. Sms are stored in the phone memory. So that will be enough to save as many messages as you want till your memory gets filled up. It can’t be that easy to fill up 27mb with only text messages.

The phone supports polyphonic (40 channels), MP3, AAC ringtones. The phone has a sound recorder too. So you can record any important speeches or sounds or even the conversations in calls too, with ease. The menu interface has a 3x4 grid type layout. To spice up the visuals, the handset comes pre installed with 4 themes – Default, Orange, cheerful and Stencil art. All the themes are good. No changes are seen in the menu layout with any of the theme.

W200i comes with a basic VGA camera (640x480) with 4x zoom. The picture quality is not good. But it would help you take some real emergency snaps. The phone supports video recording in QCIF (176x144 pixels) resolution. There are not many features in the camera. Still you can take photos in night mode and you can add some picture effects too.

Verdict:

The phone is pretty good and has almost all the basic features though it has a dull display. The absence of Bluetooth bothers a bit though. The sound features are extraordinary and by far the best a handset at this price can provide. The built in camera does no good in taking superb quality pictures but you can still use it to take some very important snaps when there is no camera available at you. Actually there is no proper rival to this phone directly. 5200 in other way shows the specs similar to w200i. In addition to the general features it has better connectivity features like Bluetooth and edge. Any way if you are a serious music lover, in need of a basic color phone with an average camera and if absence of Bluetooth doesn’t bother you, then this is the right pick for you.