Sony Ericsson W800 Review

Sony Ericsson announced the first Walkman phone in March 2005 and shipped it in August, in the orange and white of the old cassette players, and it was honest about what it was: the K750i, the best camera phone of the year, with the music player promoted to the front. The Walkman key opened a player that handled MP3 and AAC with proper album lists and a stereo output good enough that the bundled headphones were the first phone earphones you might actually keep.

A 512 MB Memory Stick PRO Duo came in the box alongside 34 MB internal, and Disc2Phone software ripped CDs straight onto it. Flight mode let you play music with the radio off, and Sony Ericsson claimed 30 hours that way from the 900 mAh cell, which in practice meant three or four days of ordinary use, in the year the iPod nano arrived and nobody thought a phone could stand in for it. The camera was the K750i's 2 megapixel autofocus unit with an LED light behind a sliding lens cover, and in 2005 it beat everything from Nokia and Motorola on detail.

The 1.8 inch 176 by 220 TFT was small and sharp, the software quick and themeable. The weak point was the joystick, which loosened and drifted after a year on this and the K750i alike, and once it went the whole phone was hard to steer. Unlocked in the US it cost 499 dollars. Motorola's iTunes ROKR came a month later and proved the point: the W800 was the music phone that worked.