The W700i

The Sony Ericson W700i comes in two colours. A jazzy white with a flashy orange border and keys and a more mellowed down Titanium Gold(as they call it) with chrome keys. Like all Sony phones, this too has a very comfortable and well animated UI unlike the Nokia or the Motorola ones in the same range and a very simple phone to use. The screen is pretty big for its time with amazing clarity. It is a walkman phone, and there are no complaints about the performance of the music on this phone either.

This phone comes with a standard 256 MB memory card. I had it upgraded the memory to 1GB which was the only expenditure I had incurred in the almost 2 years of using my W700i. No complaints what so ever. However there are a couple of places where a few things could be worked on.

I have always been a fan of joystick phones. Its a matter of whether you like it or not. I just happen to be one of the "I like joystick" person. Till about the last few days of my usage, the joystick also performed pretty well as opposed to the reviews I had got about it. The great thing about the joystick on Sony phones is that the joystick performs very well with very well defined movements unlike say a Nokia joystick phone where you always have to HOPE that it functions the way you want it to.

The 2 mega pixel camera on this phone is fantastic. The advantage with this phone in terms of photography is that the camera comes with a zoom facility. Also with the moving camera, the zoom facility holds good and there is no fixed length of the file. The best part of the camera on this phone is the flash which is very very bright which can be doubled as a torch as well. Comes in very handy ;)

The games on this phone are also pretty interesting. "Qudra-pop", a Tetris based game is very well designed and perfect to play when whilst whiling away time in a bus/train journey. My top score on that was 876670 :). The battery backup is pretty good too. It once survived for 4 days straight without giving up. Over all 9 on 10 for battery backup.

Here are My Ratings for the phone:

Looks: 6 on 10 (Sony has made better looking phones. The white one is better looking)
Usability: 8.5 on 10 (For non joystick preferring people, go for the W810i which is almost similar)
User Interface: 9 on 10
Java apps: 7 on 10
Walkman: 9 on 10
Camera: 8 on 10

Overall: 8 on 10

There are a few places where the phone could have done better. Since its a walkman phone, there could have been better controls for music in the hands free. Also the plug and play button is kinda delicate which makes the music play even when unintended. A very good buy for people who are trying to get used to a joystick phone. I had brilliant 2 years and a whole lot of memories with mine.