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Phone Features and Reception The Sony Ericsson W300i is a quad-band phone operating on the 850/900/1800//19000MHz frequencies, and will work anywhere in the world where GSM services are available. If you buy an unlocked version from Sony Ericsson, you can use it on either Cingular or T-Mobile networks in the US. If you buy the Cingular version, it will most likely be locked to Cingular. The Sony Ericsson W300i has EDGE Class 10 for data. The W300i has great reception on Cingular here in North Dallas area where both Cingular has strong coverage. The phone gets full signal strength on the phone everywhere including indoors. Since we received the unlocked version for review, we also tested it with a T-Mobile US SIM. The TMO SIM gets full signal bars outdoors and 1 bar short of full strength in some indoor areas (T-Mobile coverage is also excellent here). Call clarity is very good on Cingular. The voice quality is crisp with no distortion and the volume is high. You can control the incoming volume using the music controls on the left side of the W300i. The Sony Ericsson supports most phone features such as speed dial (1-9), redial, conference call, call waiting, call forwarding, two voice lines, call recording, speakerphone and more. It also comes with a voice dialing feature, though not true voice command, which means you will need to record voice tags before using the voice dialing feature. One nice thing about the voice dialing on the W300i is that you can use it in conjunction with hands free solutions including Bluetooth headsets. The EDGE speed is decent for data on the W300i. The Access NetFront browser bundled with the phone enhances the web surfing experience. It’s speedy by WAP browser standards and provides tools such as saving an image from a web page to your image folder, dialing a number if you highlight a phone number on a web page and other options. It handles most WAP sites with ease, and even can load some HTML pages. Should you buy the unlocked version rather than the pre-configured Cingular model, you’ll need to enter your carrier’s settings for data, MMS and email. The set-up is easy enough since you can go to www.sonyericsson.com/support and enter your device model and phone number, and you will receive a text message on your phone that will walk you through the connection setting process. Manual configuration isn’t needed on the Cingular version and all the data connection settings will be pre-loaded. Storage and Expansion The Sony Ericsson W300i has over 20MB of internal storage space out of the box (about 23MB on our unit). You can download additional applications, ringtones, images and videos from the web. The Sony Ericsson WAP portal offers some free applications such as World Clock, Converter and more. It’s worth a look. Once you’ve downloaded the jar files, you will find them in the Games folder by default. Like the W710i and the K790a, the Sony Ericsson W300i has a Memory Stick Micro (M2) slot for storage and supports up to 1GB Memory Stick Micro cards. The Memory Stick PRO Duo used in the W810i would have been too big to fit in the W300i’s petite body. The tiny Memory Stick Micro, developed by Sony and SanDisk, is about one quarter the size of Memory Stick PRO Duo and is compatible with Memory Stick PRO card readers with an adapter. Oddly, Sony Ericsson included a 256MB Memory Stick Micro card with the W300i but no adapter.
Camera Sony Ericsson pleased us with the W810i’s great camera quality that could rival some high-end Nokia camera phones. Alas the W300i is a lower end phone and has only a VGA camera with 4x digital zoom. The picture quality is quite good by VGA camera standards. You will notice a bit of the usual VGA camera phone noise in photos, but the color saturation is very good and colors are more balanced compared to many other VGA cameras, though it has a slight pink color tint. You can turn up the brightness for poorly lit areas but you will get some whiteout on reflective surfaces and white objects in your pictures. The camera can take still photos at 640 x 480, 320 x 240 and 160 x 120 resolutions. It has two picture quality settings and several shooting modes including normal, panorama, frames and burst mode. All the sample photos are taken in Fine quality at 640 x 480 resolution. The W300i’s camera can also take videos with audio in 3gp format and you can take video at either 176 x 144 or 128 x 96 resolution. The video quality is good for a VGA camera with no blocky distortion or frame jumps and the audio is in sync with the video.
Sample photos taken by the W300i Bluetooth The Sony Ericsson W300i has an integrated Bluetooth that supports most useful profiles such as Dial-Up Network (DUN), Object Push, Synchronization and both Hands-free and Headset profiles (it does not support A2DP for Bluetooth stereo headsets however). Sending files from the phone to a desktop via Bluetooth gets about 40k/s and the phone can pair with multiple devices. Pairing the W300i with Bluetooth headsets is easy and we tested it with the Cardo scala 700 and a few other Bluetooth headsets. The W300i works great with the scala 700 with clear and loud voice on both incoming and outgoing ends. It got over 20 feet in range with headsets which is very good. One nice thing about the W300i’s voice dialing is that you can use Bluetooth headset to voice dial. Make sure that you record your voice tags in a quiet environment and the voice dialing via Bluetooth headset usually gives you fairly good results. Battery life does take a hit when you keep the Bluetooth radio on and the connection with your headset alive. The Sony Ericsson does offer a powersave mode, in which case you can only connect the phone with one Bluetooth device at a time. Battery Life The Sony Ericsson W300i comes with a standard 900mAh battery (BST-33 mode). The claimed talk time is up to 9.5 hours and the claimed standby time is up to 400 hours. Our tests reached about 7 hours talk time and standby of 1.5 weeks. Those are still very good battery runtimes and should you still need more power, you can purchase an additional standard battery from Sony Ericsson. Playing music with phone radio on uses very little power and you can use even less if you boot the phone in music playing mode only without turning on any other radios. Downloading files from the web, taking photos and transferring files used reasonable amounts of battery power. The only thing that drains the power fast is the Bluetooth radio. If you keep the Bluetooth radio on and keep your Bluetooth headset and car kit connected to the phone, you will likely charge the phone every other day. Software The Sony Ericsson comes with a basic suite of PIM apps including Contacts, Calendar, Notes and Tasks. The Contacts database can store 1000 contacts on the phone, and each contacts can have five numbers, multiple email addresses, URLs, business and home street address, notes and birthday. You can also associate a contact entry with a picture for caller ID and a unique ringtone. That’s a very capable Contacts app for a feature phone that’s not targeted at business users. The Calendar, Notes and Tasks applications along with several other utility apps live in the Organizer folder. Calendar has monthly view, weekly view and appointment view. You can sync the data from the Contacts, Calendar and your notes and tasks to your desktop via PC Suite using the included USB cable. You can also sync via Bluetooth or IR, but USB 2.0 syncing is the speediest. In addition to the PIM apps, you will also get a File Manager application. The W300i comes with a CD that includes PC Suite, Adobe Photoshop Album SE, QuickTime and Disc2Phone. PC Suite is a very capable syncing application that makes sharing data between your desktop and your phone a breeze. Always check Sony Ericsson’s web site for free PC Suite updates. Another application you will use often if you use the phone as your music player is Disc2Phone. This Windows-only application will convert to MP3 and transfer songs from music CDs to your phone’s internal memory or memory card with the track and album info. The conversion time and transfer speed is decent: a full music CD will take less than 5 minutes when using the Disk2Phone to rip it to your phone. The W300i has support for SMS, MMS and email in the Messaging app. SMS is pretty straight forward, as is MMS. The email client supports POP3/IMAP4 accounts. Conclusion A very capable feature phone that’s easy to use and small enough to live in any pocket. The full Walkman treatment makes it easy to use the phone as a casual music player, though it can’t compete with iPod’s higher music storage capacity and even better fidelity. If you are looking for an affordable GSM clamshell phone with good phone features and connection capabilities, you should give the W300i a look, especially if music is your thing. Pro: Compact size and lightweight, strong reception, excellent call quality, good browser by WAP browser standards and capable messaging features. Transferring music files to the phone is easy and the expansion slot is handy for storing tunes. Score one for Sony Ericsson for supporting MP3 and AAC music file formats. USB 2.0, Bluetooth and IR keep you connected. Con: The package doesn’t include the Memory Stick Micro adapter to use with card readers. The phone is a little buggy and freezes up once in a while with no apparent cause. (When that happens reboot the phone or take the battery out for a few seconds.) The number pad keys look great but are a bit hard to use. The Bluetooth radio drains a lot of battery power. List Price: $299 without contract, less with contract Web site: www.sonyericsson.com
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