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By David D. Williams (North Wales)
I've owned a sharp gx30 for the last 3 years, and never had a problem with it until the end when the battery failed on me. However it started to look a little dodgy so I decided to go for a new phone.
I fancied this one straight away (in black) but a few of the reviews put me off. In the end I decided to go for it, and am so glad that I did! I don't find it fiddly or annoying. The memory is brilliant, the battery life is brilliant, the camera is brilliant, the lay-out is perfect and all the controls are easy to use. I can't think of a better phone to follow my gx30!
By C. D'AGORNE (Bristol and Devon, UK)
I read a lot of reviews of this phone on the internet before I bought it, and it came off slightly worse than the similar w810i, which is about a quid cheaper each month. However, the w810i is not a 3G phone, and, as far as I could ascertain, does not have a standard headphone adapter socket, meaning that only the Sony Ericsson headphones provided could be used. When trying out the w810i in the shop, in comparison to the w850, the keypad seemed basic, and did not deliver as much feedback (in the form of a positive 'click' sensation) when the keys were pressed.
The main criticisms levelled at the w850i seem to be directed at the main keypad, which was considered to be too stiff. I agree that this is a slight fault with the phone, but it is something you very rapidly get used to, as with any quirk on a new phone. The battery life was criticised in a previous review, but I have found it to be similar to the excellent battery life of my previous phone (W750i). I would suggest that music can be played through the headphones for around 8-12 hours at a reasonable volume on a single charge. This is more than adequate, an similar to many mp3 players on the market. Another criticism of this phone was that the keypad was too close to the main body of the phone; this has simply not been a problem with my w850i, although I can see that if an unusually fat thumb was used, this might be the case. The 2mp camera is not as good as in either my previous phone, the W750i, or in the W810i, but is still a reasonable camera for outdoor shots and static indoor shots. However, it is not something that would produce good shots in, for example, a club. If you are considering buying this phone for the camera, don't, period.
However, the real benefit of this phone is the music software. The phone comes bundled with a 1gb card, which is fine if you have 10-15 albums you want to listen to, but I have purchased a 4gb card (at present an 8gb card is £100 at play.com). This will enable me to store my entire music collection (in mp3 format). The software on the phone is beautiful, offering a similar 'browse by...' function to the iPod. You can browse by artist, album, track, and create and play 'playlists'. The software is quick and good quality, and sound quality with the bundled headphones is superb. The headphone lead comprises a bit which plugs into the phone, which has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack at the end; the second part of the headphones plugs into this jack and has 3 different types of rubber earpiece; the best being 'earplug' style, blocking out much ambient noise. The 3.5mm connector means that you can play music direct to external speakers, with the appropriate connector (available for most devices for about £2-5). In this manner, I can connect my phone to my hi-fi and it plays the same quality sound as if I was streaming the music from my PC.
The music software for the PC isn't quite as impressive, relying, as it does, on a USB 1.1 connection (which means songs take about 15 seconds each to load to the phone on the maximum 192kbps setting). However, all you have to do is select the music you want on the phone in the program, then select 'transfer to phone'. The transfer process can continue unsupervised, so, much as this slow connection is annoying, it shouldn't be a problem if you can just leave the music to upload and come back 30 mins later (for approx 1gb transfer). The software does, however, intuitively recognise track name, artist and album, which are then displayed on the phone. It did this without any help from myself.
This phone is good-looking and smooth to use the intuitive user interface, I'm glad I bought it instead of the w810i, as the music software and feel of the phone is superior, and I feel that the phone will still feel modern a year and a half from now when my contract runs out. I strongly recommend the w850i to anyone who wants a phone for the purpose of playing music.
By Mr. Ross Paul Robinson (UK)
Its easy to be seduced by this phone as it looks attractive and promises a lot (phone, picture messages, video messages, quality camera, walkman, and various others). However I have been severely disappointed with it and was close to throwing it in the Thames earlier today. Lets first discuss the basics.
1. Call quality: worse than my previous phone but manageable.
2. Texting: more cumbersome than my previous phone e.g. trying to write the common word 'will' always present the word 'wilk' as a first option! Additionally the phone is weighted so that the centre of gravity is above the index finger, the result is the phone is constantly falling away from you, this ergonomic fault drives me nuts.
3. Camera: 2 mega pixels sounds impressive but unless your subject is dead or asleep the image will blur, a photo of someone walking past will look artistically blurred, someone dancing will look like the camera was dipped in Vaseline.
4. Walkman. Music quality is ok, user interface is a bit slow to navigate. If your anything other than a casual music listener (and if you are your not going to go to the effort to put music on this phone) you will be better of buying an iPod. The software that is provided to transfer music is slow and unintuitive, for example there is no obvious way of searching for music on the PC the phone is connected to.
5. The software for calendar is rubbish, you can not view your calendar events in a list. As another owner said the only indicator that an event is on a day is the fact that the date is in bold, which is not clear.
6. The battery dies quick. This is simply a feature of having a big bright colour screen, but I will learn from my experience in the future and get something with a simpler screen.
7. The phone is bulky, it looks great in a shop but rubbish as a great big lump in your pocket.
Others: These are features that may be due to a faulty handset or user error, so may be isolated to my handset:
Software jams a lot. Seven times so far (in two months), this means the battery has to come out and the phone restarted.
When the front panel is slide upwards often the caller can only hear what your saying intermittently, this is a common problem with phones with moving (especially sliding) parts.
The software for connecting the phone for file share does not appear to work, the phone is simply not recognized when the USB cable is inserted. This may be because the software is not intuitive and I am not using it properly or it may be a fault, either way it is not fit for purpose.
It may well be because the service is not set up correctly but despite having an expensive contract I have not been able to send picture messages.
Summary:
Every feature the phone has it delivers in sub-par performance. The phone build is poor, the voice quality average, the software poor, the camera, not usable in a social way, the Walkman will annoy you. The W850i promises a lot but you'll wish you bought a simple phone, iPod Nano and a digital camera, those will actually work. Don't be seduced.
By OLi (Plymouth, UK)
[...] I can say its quite possibly one of the best phones on the market today! Easily.
The 2megapixel camera is good, and it doesn't have zoom or autofocus, but it does have a fill light/flash. pics are always good - though they can be a little blurry in low light - as you'd espect.
the walkman feature is great but it is easy, especially as a klutz type bloke, to hit the orange walkman button in the middle of the d pad sometimes. you get used to this and i haven't done anything so clumsy since a week after i got this phone. and i'm a clumsy klutz of a bloke.
the menus are easy to navigate - but i'm used to sony ericsson phones having had a k700 before this. anyone who says nokia are better is out of touch. sony ericsson is the way forward...
the 1gb card you get with the phone is great! i've got several albums and hundreds of tunes and i downloaded a load of games (about 30 on at the mo) and still got over a third of the memory left. upgradable cheaply and easily on amazon or ebay!
nice and sturdy design means dropping it and drop kicking it down the street doesn't destroy it within two months of getting your nice shiny new phone.
easily connects to your pc. some pcs i find i can just plug it in and drag and drop stuff on or off the phone. but only two pcs that i used have i had to install software. available from sony ericcson site or on cd with your new phone.
basically - thsi phone is FANTASTIC! you will not be disappointed if you want it as a walkman mp3 player, camera phone, to fill with games (think lime and wire) or a standard call and text phone. it is simply brilliant and hopefully as SE get better at slide phones they will get slimmer. but as it is
5 STARS. A+. 10/10. EXCELLENT/OUTSTANDING!
By Richtourist (London UK)
I have a Sony Ericson w850i. Mine is not on Vodafone, it's on another network and they have been fine, so I won't mention them. The phone, however, I can not recommend.
The Good:
The camera seems to be very good quality, and the functions useful and accessible.
The screen is quite big, and certainly clear.
It has a torch, which is much more useful than you might think.
The buttons on the keypad are positive.
The Bad:
The buttons on the navigate pad are awkward, and you often catch the MP3 button.
The Menu systems are inconsistent, misleading, and clumsily arranged. For example, when you've finished a call its all too easy to open the browser, because the 'End Call' button becomes the 'Browser' button just as you go to press it. This may seem a small thing, but it is this lack of skill by the designers that is repeated all over the phone, and leads to repeated minor annoyance.
Example: When unlocking the keypad, sometimes it requires two buttons pressed, but in one mode it only requires one. A small thing? Yes, but that second button has just turned into the browser button, so every now and then you will accidentally open the browser. Also, the two buttons used to unlock are the easiest to press when the phone is in your pocket, and mine has twice tried to videocall my home when it should have been locked in my pocket. You can set it to lock when you shut the phone, but it still unlocks if you push the buttons!
Example: Delete is never available when you want it.
Example: The Help (called 'Info') states the obvious most of the time, and is not there at other times.
Example: When you use a file command like 'Add' it looks like it is going to apply to the selected item, but it applies to the whole list without warning.
Example: This one is really annoying... Usually you either start with the object (say a file) and apply the function (say delete), or the other way around. But this phone does it different ways for different things, which doesn't make for ease of use.
Example: There are two buttons for starting the browser, plus a menu option and a short cut. The browser leads to soft porn mags mostly. I don't care how 'naughty' Melissa is, if I wanted porn I would chose it myself, thank you.
Useless Things: You can do all sorts of useless things, like compose tinny music, make a photo look like it is a painting, or make a picture appear for a second while the phone starts, but you cant do something useful like set how long the screen stays on for. Nor can you set it to stay on until you want if off. So if you pause to compose a text, you will for ever have to press a button and wait while it shows you the time (why?) before the screen comes back.
Short Cuts. You can set short cuts and put them on the spare buttons (the ones that aren't set to Browser). This would be good, but the phone resets them if you turn it off. So it is almost useless.
The Mp3 Player. It sounds fine. It looks good. But it isn't consistent about using Tag3 information. I'm not sure but it might down load info about albums or something. It mixes tracks from albums sometimes when it thinks it knows better than you. So if your mate's band has a track called 'Tick' you may find it now belongs to The Yeah Yeah Yeahs (my mate should take that as a compliment, though) I really can't believe that it did that, and haven't been able to work out why it did.
If you try to view the current playlist it will continuously cover it with the current track info, so you spend most of your time making it go back to what you actually want. This sort of problem is all over the phone.
The software that comes with the phone is appauling. firstly I can't remove its icon from my desk top. But worse than that it knows what I want better than I do! And worst of all it seemed to fail to complete a USB transfer which left the phone continuously resetting. I spoke to customer services who told me to send it back to them. But managed to fix it by connecting it to a computer without the software, as a standard mass storage device, and resetting it manualy.
There is no proper way to edit the phone book, either. The phone likes Outlook by Microsoft, and I even let them talk, but soon changed my mind. However, you can back the file up to the mem card and edit it with Notepad in XP by USB.
The calendar function is useless. A day with an engagement is shown in bold, but bold isn't really different to normal so you can't tell.
You have to use a special cable. For everything. I thought this would be ok before I bought the phone, But It Is Not Ok.
Sometimes (if picked from a 'recent list') when you text, you can't tell which number you are sending to. So if someone has more than one number..
there is more ( the profiles are badly done, and the icons aren't explained or deferentiated well, and ...) but I'm too tired to go on.
PUT IT THIS WAY: I haven't bothered to set it up for email because I don't think it will be worth it. I am tied in to a contract, but if I can ditch the phone I will.
The Ugly:
There is nothing ugly about this phone. It looks really good all round.
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