Ericsson W300i Views

General Goods

Inside the phone you'll find the 1.75-inch (128x160) internal display. Sony Ericsson always does a good job with its displays, and the W300i is no exception. Bright and vivid, it displays all 262,144 colors beautifully and is perfect for viewing photos and videos, playing games, and scrolling through the user-friendly menus. You can change the brightness but not the font size or backlighting time.

On the other hand, Sony Ericsson doesn't have a great track record with navigation controls and keypad buttons. Though it made positive strides with the W810i, the W300i shows a return to bad habits. The five-way toggle is big and doubles as a shortcut to four user-defined functions, but it's flush with the surface of the phone and thus takes some getting used to. The flat soft keys, clear button, and back control are spaced far from the toggle, but they're quite small given the phone's size. Also, while this isn't a bad thing, keep in mind that most Sony Ericsson phones do not have dedicated Talk and End keys.

Since the W300i is meant for a fairly average cell phone user, Sony Ericsson included a VGA shooter instead of a megapixel model. You can take pictures in three resolutions (640x480, 320x240, 160x120) and choose from a variety of editing options, including four color effects, a night mode, two quality settings, a self-timer, 19 fun frames, and a brightness control. There's also a digital zoom, which varies by the pictures size--at the lowest resolution it's 4X, but it's not available at the highest resolution. Other special picture effects include a burst mode for taking four shots in rapid succession and a nifty panorama option. For audio effects, you can choose from four shutter sounds, but there's no silent option. The camcorder takes MPEG-4 videos in two resolutions (176x144 and 128x96) with sound and offers a comparable set of editing options. Clip length is capped at two minutes for multimedia messages; otherwise length is limited by the available memory.

You can personalize the W300i with a variety of themes, wallpaper, and screensavers. As always, you can purchase more options and ring tones from Sony Ericsson via the WAP 2.0 wireless Web browser. Alternatively, the phone comes with a Music DJ application for composing your own ring tones and a quirky application called Music Match that plays guitar chords and piano notes. Though it was fun, it wasn't terribly useful. Gamers can enjoy three Java (J2ME) titles, Neopets, QuadraPop, and PuzzleSlider, with additional titles available for purchase.