By Nate Lanxon, CNET.co.uk
12/05/2008
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/mobilephones/0,39051199,42213850p,00.htm

Ever since we saw the excellent W890i from Sony Ericsson, we've been itching to find out what was next. The W380i might not be anywhere near as high-end as the W890i, but it's the first model we've seen since our March review of SE's metallic beaut.

Design

Solidity and style are two key factors of the W380i's chassis, with a good overall feel and no noticeable "creak factor". A small one-line LCD display is set into the front outer casing and remains invisible most of the time. It lights up with text when you receive a text or call to let you know who's after your attention. Dedicated touch-sensitive Walkman control buttons sit just below this display.

There's no apparent fragility to the design, making it suitable for most usage scenarios; it'd probably survive small falls to the ground without too much moaning. A 176 x 220-pixel display is characteristic of this budget handset but decent pixel density and good brightness make it pleasant to use, and browsing the Web with Opera Mini (after we installed it) was perfectly acceptable.

Acceptable too is the button layout--it's intuitive and easy to use, and the keypad features well-spaced out, flat buttons, making speed texting easily possible after just minutes of getting used to it. Sadly, there's no 3.5mm headphone socket, instantly making this a frustrating music phone.

Features

Getting music on the W380i, though, is a piece of cake--either drag and drop MP3s through Windows, or use the fairly simple bundled media manager for all media types. The software also pulls podcasts to the handset with relative ease. It should be noted that only MP3s are compatible--forget using WMA files, protected or otherwise, so Napster downloads are useless.

You can also sync with Windows Media Player, excluding any WMP-created playlists. Browsing music on the phone is pretty typical of an MP3 player and it can be accessed with a dedicated Walkman button. Music is sorted by artist and album, and you can create multiple playlists of tracks easily on the phone.

The single 1.3-megapixel camera is synonymous with budget handsets and comes without a flash, but does feature a 4x digital zoom. There's also stereo A2DP Bluetooth, an FM radio, Java games, EDGE and 3G, but no HSDPA, unfortunately.

Sony Ericsson's built-in Web browser is poor, so we advise installing Opera Mini for free. The app makes browsing the full Internet a treat, and it's extremely quick on the W380i. All of a sudden it's no longer a budget Web experience.

Performance

Call quality is excellent, although maximum volume is relatively quiet. If you work in loud environments, this isn't going to be your favorite phone. We also found that trying to use the speaker phone function when cooking in the kitchen was problematic due to volume limitations.

The same is true for music playback. You'll need to get yourself some sound-isolating earphones to get the most from your listening experience. We weren't ever blown away by the W380i's music performance, though--audio quality is average at best, and the bundled earphones are rubbish. There's no good reason for this phone to be considered a decent replacement for a dedicated MP3 player unless the convenience of carrying a single device outweighs your desire for great sound quality.

You can easily apply the same logic for the camera, which produces average 1,280 x 1,024-pixel images, though note there's no flash to help you out in darker environments. Battery life is actually fairly good, however, at seven hours of constant talk time and 300 hours on standby. Be aware that the battery's performance will be significantly lower with Bluetooth in use. Still, we got from a Friday morning until Monday without charging, using the phone an average amount, including Web browsing and sporadic music playback.

Conclusion

The W380i is an enjoyable phone to use and won't give newbies to Sony Ericsson handsets any major trouble. We certainly wouldn't recommend choosing this over a different handset on the grounds of its abilities as an MP3 player, as even a low-end player such as iriver's E100 blows it away in terms of features and performance. As an affordable little clamshell it's more than pleasant.