Sony Ericsson W580i Walkman

Print

Email

Bookmark

Share

Add to My Products

By Kim Fong, CNET.com.au
Sep 7, 2007

The thin and sexy W580i brings great new meaning to walking with your phone. It's ideal for musically-inclined health junkies that loves to walk, run or jog with their MP3 player and their phone. The phone is sleek and lightweight but also solidly built.

Editors' note:

This review is based on tests done by our sister site CNET.com.au. As such, please note that there may be slight differences in the testing procedure and ratings system. For more information on the actual tests conducted on the product, please inquire directly at the site where the article was originally published. References made to some other products or telcos in this review may not be available or applicable in your country. Please check directly with your local distributor for details.

Design
The W580i is one of the latest Walkman phones from Sony Ericsson. Sporting a slim design measuring 99 by 47 by 14mm and weighing just 94 grams, the W580i is packed with some funky features such as an MP3 player, radio and a pedometer that counts your steps. These could be seen as just gimmicks but at the end of the day you're carrying less.

For those less concerned about music and step counting, the W580i displays a brilliant, clear TFT screen with 262K colours and 240 by 320 pixels. The 2-megapixel camera protected beneath the closed slide records both stills and video and has a variety of shooting modes and functions including night mode, blogging, panorama, sepia and black and white effects, minus a flash. White balance and picture quality is, to an extent, adjustable. With 12MB internal memory and a 512MB Memory Stick Micro M2 included in the box, the W580i is built well with a nice look and feel. It comes in three styles (white with orange, black with orange and grey with blue) and even has coloured lights streaming out of it when the phone rings.

Being that it is a slider phone, the keypad is set in and can be difficult to press keys with larger fingers. The navigation buttons are well sized and the layout is typical of most Sony Ericssons, making it easy to use.

Features
This phone has been marketed as a "Street Style Walkman Phone" for active people. Its list of features fit this description well and set it aside from the rest of the Sony Ericsson models. As mentioned, it's a portable MP3 player, a camera, a camcorder, a radio tuner, a pedometer and a mobile web browser. It supports quadband GSM and EDGE networks--it's not 3G unfortunately.

Like many of the latest Sony Ericsson phones, Java games and applications, blogs, RSS feeds and music recognition are available on the W580i as well as the standard organiser applications including calculator, alarm clock, calendar, notes, phone book, flight mode, stopwatch and timer.

It also has a feature called "Shake to Shuffle" where you can randomly select a song by shaking it. It's funky, doesn't always work so well, but again, another gimmick where changing a track is just as easy as pressing a button.

Performance »